cyborgsdodance

To continue with my previous thinking on the wiki as a teaching tool, I've decided to try to use the wiki as a collaborative ongoing text. Much inspired by Matt Barton's students from St. Cloud State University do with their course wiki Rhetoric and Composition: A Guide for the College Writer, I would like to have the teachers develop a wiki as a guide for the middle school and high school writers. What exactly will be included will be up to the teachers. I will suggest some catagories and provide some examples, but then they will add to the wiki what they feel is helpful.

I value the idea of exploring online resources and then sharing the gems with others much like active bloggers do. I tried to promote this last year with having the students include one "resource link" per week to their professional blogs. While this was effective in getting the students to explore online spaces for writing resources, it wasn't as helpful in terms of sharing the gems. While the few that visited the individual's blog were able to benefit, posting the links on the the wiki, under organized catagories would make the resources more accessable to a wider audience, which taps into the collaborative potential of the wiki.

Some catagories that I'm thinking about so far are...

Researching
Prewriting
Drafting
Revising (genre ... )
Gathering Feedback (peer review ... conferencing ... partner share)
Editing (grammar... conventions ... mechanics)
Publishing
Assessment
Writer Identity (gender... race ... class in writing)
Testing -- The 5 Paragraph essay

This is just a start. I hope to add more ideas and examples of such collaborative wikis as I come accross them.

Posted by Candance Doerr at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Clicking through flickr, I stumbled on the photo collection of BrittneyBush. Reaching near 3,000 photos, this photography participates frequently in posting photos and comments. I was taken in by her eye, "making strange" the normal objects our eyes gloss over daily. Her photo collection is quite stunning.

Also of interest were the different groupings she had of her photos under the heading "Best of." Below are two shots I decided to feature, for reasons I'll got to below. In the meantime, take a moment, to indulge in some short slide shows to get a feel for how other's view her work and for how she views and her work.

Yes, It's A Glamorous Job -- from Best of...Other's Favorites

Access Denied -- from Best of...The ABCs of Brittney

What is interesting to me about these two collections is how each has its own character or style. What BrittneyBush likes best about her own photo style is not necessarily what others find most appealing about her work. The photo "Yes, It's a Glamorous Job" seems to involve BrittneyBush making a statement about the irony in societal depictions and expectations of women. Yet, when you read through the 140 comments posted to this photo, only a few address this possible meaning. Most people focus on the subject's body and accessories and make little note of the conflicting images (toilet bowl, rubber gloves) even though BrittneyBush's tags for the photo suggests some sort of social critique. Tags include: me, self portrait, housewife, righteous feminist indignation, it's not that I'm unhappy, it's just that somehow, this is not what I had planned on, sexy.

I don't mean to say that the other viewer's interpretations are wrong, rather that meaning is fickle. Although we put so much effort into our production and presentation of ideas, we can't control what happens to them once we put them out there. Others will receive them and us how they will. All that said, even though "Yes, It's A Glamorous Job" isn't one of BrittneyBush's personal picks, I love this photo for its irony, and would place it in her best of.

Posted by Candance Doerr at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If music be the food of love, play on. --Twelfth Night

Well, what about the sounds of food and their play with the mouth? I never really considered the rhetorical implications of sound until I started playing around with video myself. Thinking more about the power of sound, which is largely "overlooked" when considering the impact of visual modes, has got
me thinking about the sound I capture in video. Inspired by other vloggers (like Kevin O. of Video Haiku) who are using video to "see" sounds ordinarily ignored, this short clip explores the sounds of pizza, pre-consumption. Buen provecho!

It seems that some people are looking into sound and its "persuasive" qualities. Adrian North researches the psychological impacts of sound

Posted by Candance Doerr at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I prepare to work with preservice English teachers this coming spring, I've been thinking a lot about how I want to use different interactive software such as blogs and wikis.

I have a pretty good idea how I plan to use blogs. Last year I had students create and maintain indivual professional blogs. Some students told me that visiting and comment on each others' blogs was the first time that they were able to interact with their classmates ideas. So, I plan to do something very similar to the profressional weblogs.

My concern in writing now is to explore the wiki as a writing tool. I used the wiki this past summer with practicing teachers as part of the Minnesota Writing Project's Summer Invitational Institute. We used the wiki as a space to collaborative engage and write about books that we were reading in small groups. While collaboration was the goal of the wiki, I don't know how much this actually happened. My hope was that the groups would use the wiki to gather and link online resources and perhaps post comments and questions about the book. Then, I thought they'd actually sit down to collaboratively write, making decisions together on content, voice, and examples. From the feedback I gained, it seemed that most groups just devided the task among people. So rather than working collaboratively to create meaning, the group members worked individually on similar content.

What was a beautifly example of collaborative work were the final projects that the teachers presented about their book's. As a group, they needed to decide on what ideas to focus and how to present the material in an engaging way for the rest of the institute participants.

With this is mind, I'm trying to think about how I can restructure the book club reading responsibilities in a way to promote this collective problem solving. What are my goals, and how does the wiki meet these goals? These are the questions I need to think about.

to be continued...

Posted by Candance Doerr at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Victoria Davis, from The Cool Cat Teacher blog, calls her classroom wiki a "virtual hub of all classroom activities". In an attempt to herd together my many straying and fragmenting research interests, I have started a research wiki. I hope that this wiki will hub together all my digital musings, teaching, and play.

In the meantime, take a peek... Nonikwe's Rabbit Hole

Posted by Candance Doerr at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here lies my attempt to use a graphic organizer to organize my thinking. Inspired by how Krista Kennedy's students were "transforming text" with Comiclife to map out content, I decided to try some of the visual options and sounds effects for myself. I enjoyed the sound effects, especially the stretching sounds, that accompanied my movements of text bubbles across the page.

Sounds aside, however, I actually felt hindered in my ability to think through my ideas. In fact, when I finished I felt farther from my topic than when I started. I admit that this may have nothing to do with Comiclife. Maybe what this reveals is my dependence on the pen and paper to process through the initial stages of writing. I may be a digital native in some aspects of composition, but definitely not in terms of digital brainstorming.

Posted by Candance Doerr at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)