Although Mark Crane warned me about this possibility last week, somehow the engladj list got deleted. Since I can't reactivate it, I've simply started another list: engadj@lists.uvu.edu and updated each of your email addresses following your fall 2009 schedule preferences.
Sorry about any inconvenience this change may cause. You should have all received subscription notices today.
Don't forget that if you're ever unsure about receiving messages, they're copied here on the UV Writing blog. This may turn out to be our most stable site, but I'll also stick with the listserv.
Thanks for your work, and I'll see you soon.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
April Meetings/Adjunct Social
Our monthly meetings will be held Tuesday and Wednesday next week (the 7th and 8th), at 5pm in the usual place.
Following program business announcements and addressing questions and concerns from the group, we'll return to portfolios for the bulk of our time. I'll outline the purpose of adding a portfolio component to the assignment sequence for program assessment purposes, a basic plan for compiling documents, and some ways to use portfolios in your own classes. Gae Lyn will present some of the recent scholarship on assessment and how portfolios fit into larger assessment questions. We should have ample time for questions and discussion to follow.
And, here's an invitation from the faculty center with attachments to two upcoming events:
*******
Deans and Chairs,
The Faculty Center is holding their 3rd Annual Adjunct Social on April 10,
from 6:00-8:00 p.m. We would like to ask you to encourage your adjuncts to
attend, and we also would like to personally invite you and a guest to this
event. Registration is open until Monday, April 6, at the following url:
http://www.uvu.edu/facultycenter/events/adjunctfacultysocial/registration.php
In addition, we would like to request you encourage your faculty to attend
and you to attend the First Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Engagement
Conference on April 13-14. I am attaching an agenda detailing the sessions
that will be presented on these days.
Registration is open until Monday, April 6 at the following url:
http://www.uvu.edu/facultycenter/events/scholarteachingconference/registration.php
Thank you for your support,
Ursula
*********
See you next week.
Following program business announcements and addressing questions and concerns from the group, we'll return to portfolios for the bulk of our time. I'll outline the purpose of adding a portfolio component to the assignment sequence for program assessment purposes, a basic plan for compiling documents, and some ways to use portfolios in your own classes. Gae Lyn will present some of the recent scholarship on assessment and how portfolios fit into larger assessment questions. We should have ample time for questions and discussion to follow.
And, here's an invitation from the faculty center with attachments to two upcoming events:
*******
Deans and Chairs,
The Faculty Center is holding their 3rd Annual Adjunct Social on April 10,
from 6:00-8:00 p.m. We would like to ask you to encourage your adjuncts to
attend, and we also would like to personally invite you and a guest to this
event. Registration is open until Monday, April 6, at the following url:
http://www.uvu.edu/facultycenter/events/adjunctfacultysocial/registration.php
In addition, we would like to request you encourage your faculty to attend
and you to attend the First Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Engagement
Conference on April 13-14. I am attaching an agenda detailing the sessions
that will be presented on these days.
Registration is open until Monday, April 6 at the following url:
http://www.uvu.edu/facultycenter/events/scholarteachingconference/registration.php
Thank you for your support,
Ursula
*********
See you next week.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
March meetings coming up
Our March meetings are coming up next week, 3 and 4 March, and we'll be in the usual SC 206 g/h location.
We'd like to use the March meetings to start the process of thinking about how to incorporate portfolios into our first year comp courses. Doug alerted us to this likelihood last year, and it seems time to follow up on it for a couple of reasons, but mainly because portfolios will give us the means to assess our writing courses more effectively than in some past attempts. Since we'd like to involve our instructors as much as possible in the planning stages, please consider sharing your experiences with portfolios at our meetings next week. Think, for instance, about:
1. How many assignments you ask students to include: how many (or which particular papers) are required, and which are open to student choice?
2. How heavily do (or perhaps should) portfolios weigh in final course grades?
3. How do you incorporate students' reflective writing (i.e. self-assessment) into the portfolio?
4. How much weight do you give to revision?
Certainly too, share both positive and negative experiences you've had with portfolios, so that we can not only consider the directions we should pursue, but also anticipate challenges that may arise from particular approaches.
I'll bring some hard copies to the meeting, but in case you'd like to get ahead of it, or if the electronic version works best, I'm attaching the schedule preference form for fall 2009 on the listserv. The deadline to turn them in is 13 March.
A few people have asked about summer classes, so let me update everyone now. I hope to see a summer schedule by the end of the week. If you're interested in summer classes, please drop me an email by Monday.
See you soon.
We'd like to use the March meetings to start the process of thinking about how to incorporate portfolios into our first year comp courses. Doug alerted us to this likelihood last year, and it seems time to follow up on it for a couple of reasons, but mainly because portfolios will give us the means to assess our writing courses more effectively than in some past attempts. Since we'd like to involve our instructors as much as possible in the planning stages, please consider sharing your experiences with portfolios at our meetings next week. Think, for instance, about:
1. How many assignments you ask students to include: how many (or which particular papers) are required, and which are open to student choice?
2. How heavily do (or perhaps should) portfolios weigh in final course grades?
3. How do you incorporate students' reflective writing (i.e. self-assessment) into the portfolio?
4. How much weight do you give to revision?
Certainly too, share both positive and negative experiences you've had with portfolios, so that we can not only consider the directions we should pursue, but also anticipate challenges that may arise from particular approaches.
I'll bring some hard copies to the meeting, but in case you'd like to get ahead of it, or if the electronic version works best, I'm attaching the schedule preference form for fall 2009 on the listserv. The deadline to turn them in is 13 March.
A few people have asked about summer classes, so let me update everyone now. I hope to see a summer schedule by the end of the week. If you're interested in summer classes, please drop me an email by Monday.
See you soon.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
February Meeting Followup
Thanks for attending our February meetings last week, and thanks Gae Lyn for heading the Wednesday session.
Just to catch everyone up and give everyone access to documentation, here's a link to the university policies on awarding UW grades and accommodating military leave. Gae Lyn followed up on questions about the last drop date (after which we should avoid giving any UW grades), which is February 19, later than I believed.
There was also some discussion about administrative drops. The department typically does not use the administrative drop option, but we're working on ways to get the institution to allow wait listing when students attempt to sign up for full sections, which we hope will--if used as we imagine--allow for more flexibility in the first few weeks of the term.
As we consider assessment plans for the coming academic year, it's likely that we'll follow up on Doug's suggestion last year of incorporating some kind of portfolio system into the existing assignment sequences. I'll link here to Basic Comp's portfolio guidelines so you can get an idea of what they've been doing, but we'll try to spend some time in our upcoming monthly meetings proposing some approaches and getting your feedback before we proceed with any new requirements.
Finally, I hope we'll be able to distribute schedule preference forms for fall 2009 soon. Since we're a few weeks out from our March meeting, you'll probably get the forms first via email, but we'll have hard copies available as well once we get a sense of the fall schedule.
See you in the halls.
Just to catch everyone up and give everyone access to documentation, here's a link to the university policies on awarding UW grades and accommodating military leave. Gae Lyn followed up on questions about the last drop date (after which we should avoid giving any UW grades), which is February 19, later than I believed.
There was also some discussion about administrative drops. The department typically does not use the administrative drop option, but we're working on ways to get the institution to allow wait listing when students attempt to sign up for full sections, which we hope will--if used as we imagine--allow for more flexibility in the first few weeks of the term.
As we consider assessment plans for the coming academic year, it's likely that we'll follow up on Doug's suggestion last year of incorporating some kind of portfolio system into the existing assignment sequences. I'll link here to Basic Comp's portfolio guidelines so you can get an idea of what they've been doing, but we'll try to spend some time in our upcoming monthly meetings proposing some approaches and getting your feedback before we proceed with any new requirements.
Finally, I hope we'll be able to distribute schedule preference forms for fall 2009 soon. Since we're a few weeks out from our March meeting, you'll probably get the forms first via email, but we'll have hard copies available as well once we get a sense of the fall schedule.
See you in the halls.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Incorporating New Media in the Classroom
In my now 4+ years as a writing teacher and through my own experiences as a student, I've come to realize that one of the most valuable ways to improve as a writer is to get a great deal of feedback. (And recent neurological and educational research would seem to corroborate that.) Unfortunately, with class sizes as large as they are due to budget constraints, there is a limit to how much one-on-one feedback and personalized mentorship I'm able to provide to each of my students. (There is only so much that one person can do, after all!)
Not that I'm advocating this for any of you, but I tend to go a little above and beyond the call of duty and meet with each student via the phone for at least 20 minutes to discuss their rough drafts for every major paper. This is a tremendous sacrifice of my personal time and energy, but I keep doing it since my students say it's often the #1 most helpful thing about my class. Plus, I tend to find a big improvement in most of my student's writing as a result of these conferences. While part of me is always concerned that I may not be able to sustain this level of commitment in the future, another part of me wishes there was some way I could give them more feedback and guidance even earlier in the writing process.
That's why I'm starting to see some of the appeals of using new media (e.g. Web 2.0 applications) in the college writing classroom. I've been enjoying a blog and podcast called Academic Evolution recently. It was launched by Gideon Burton, a former mentor of mine and a professor of English at Brigham Young University. Academic Evolution is devoted to exploring the ways new media is changing (or should change) the way academic discourse is carried out---in both the college classroom and in scholarly research.
Episode 3 of the podcast was about Blogging in College Writing Instruction. I recommend downloading it and listening to it yourself, but for those of you who don't have the time (it's about 35 minutes long), I'll summarize it here. The episode is basically a discussion between Burton and Kathy Cowley, a graduate writing instructor who is trying an experiment using blogging as an integral part of her instruction this semester. In the podcast, Cowley argues that real-world writing involves a 3-way rhetorical interaction between the writer, the content, and the audience. The problem is that the classroom is an artificial rhetorical context because it lacks a real audience. Students spend 30+ hours on a writing assignment that is only read by their professor (and maybe a disgruntled peer or two). But it doesn't have to be that way. Using a term coined by Rosa Eberly, she argues that classrooms can become a "proto-public" space by fostering greater collaboration between peers.
Cowley is trying to foster greater peer collaboration through blogging. She requires her students to write three weekly blog entries on their class blog (one before each session of class). The entries must be at least a paragraph long and need to be semi-polished prose. The students also need to post 10 comments on posts written by their fellow students by the end of the week. Cowley posts weekly blog prompts and blog assignment directions for the students on a separate blog. For example, Cowley frequently requires students to post portions of the papers they are working on so that they can get feedback from their peers. Cowley reports that many students have revised their arguments and ideas based on the initial responses from their fellow students. She feels the experiment has been successful so far.
I can see how Cowley's blogging idea could have some good applications for assignments such as the Summary/Strong Response paper in 1010 and the Analysis/Synthesis paper in 2010. Since those assignments involve having students respond to a common text, I see value in having students exchange and debate the ideas in these texts in a more proto-public forum such as a blog. I try to get students to engage in these kinds of discussions during my class, but these good discussions often get cut off when class time ends. Plus, I think an online forum could entice some of my more shy or introverted students to participate in discussions a little more.
As a side note, I also recommend checking out Episode 2 of the podcast, The Facebook Experiment. In this episode, Burton discusses his own experiment using a Facebook group to foster better class discussions about literature. Burton's use of Facebook is another possibly good use of new media in the classroom that is in a similar vein as Cowley's. If you have a Facebook account, you can check out his class's Facebook group: BYU English 251 Sect 4 (Winter 2009).
Hopefully you'll find some of these ideas helpful and provocative!
Friday, January 30, 2009
February Meetings Coming Up
Our February meetings will be held next week, Tuesday and Wednesday in SC 206 G/H, 5:00-6:30.
I'm happy to announce that we'll be joined this month by Forrest Williams, Chair, and at least one other faculty member from the Basic Composition Program. They'll have a presentation on recent developments in their program that in many positive ways reflect our own, and then lead a discussion and answer whatever questions you may have about the ways they're preparing students for our courses, the relationship between 089/099 and 1010/2010, and so on.
We should also have some time to discuss other questions and matters of concern regarding your classes, including folllowing up on last month's topics as necessary.
Please feel free to email me (gosherjo@uvu.edu) if you'd like any issues added to our agenda or have any questions you'd like us to address as a group. Otherwise, see you next week.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
downloading/starting micrograde
Steps for downloading Micrograde
Login to UV Link (use Windows Explorer rather than Mozilla)
· Open the help tab
· Open “Employee” file in Download Manager window
· Choose your platform (Mac/PC)
· Open Micrograde file and click on “Micrograde Setup exe”
· Run installer
Setting up courses is pretty intuitive, and the micrograde program will walk you through each step:
· Name your course and term
· Select grading methods (points or percentages)
· Set grade standards (either confirm the default grade breakdown or adjust as you wish)
· Fill in grade categories and weights.
· Add student names to populate your class roster. Blackboard/Web CT users can import class roster into Micrograde, but in my experience, it simply doesn’t take long to type in student names.
Don’t hesitate to stop by or email if you have any questions about using the program.
Of course you need not use Micrograde, but you have to maintain a detailed record of grades --rather than final grades alone--over the term that you can give to Meredith after finals.
See you later--next month at the latest.
Login to UV Link (use Windows Explorer rather than Mozilla)
· Open the help tab
· Open “Employee” file in Download Manager window
· Choose your platform (Mac/PC)
· Open Micrograde file and click on “Micrograde Setup exe”
· Run installer
Setting up courses is pretty intuitive, and the micrograde program will walk you through each step:
· Name your course and term
· Select grading methods (points or percentages)
· Set grade standards (either confirm the default grade breakdown or adjust as you wish)
· Fill in grade categories and weights.
· Add student names to populate your class roster. Blackboard/Web CT users can import class roster into Micrograde, but in my experience, it simply doesn’t take long to type in student names.
Don’t hesitate to stop by or email if you have any questions about using the program.
Of course you need not use Micrograde, but you have to maintain a detailed record of grades --rather than final grades alone--over the term that you can give to Meredith after finals.
See you later--next month at the latest.
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