Better Blogging

While I have been taking a break from this julie@century blog this summer, I have been working with another blog with my online tech writing students.

The course ended yesterday, and I have to say that asking students to write and share blog posts has been a *terrific* learning experience for them, the best blogging I've read since I've been using this assignment. Here's how it works:

• I asked them to sign up for Google Alerts to get messages about "Technical Writing" in the news (analogous to the in-class discussion we would have if we were meeting f2f). The news stories show up in their email inboxes, usually 4 or 5 a week.
• I put the instructions for how to set up this alert right in the syllabus -- it's a first example of instructions, which is the second assignment students write for the class. (A syllabus is a piece of technical writing, after all.)
  
• I have created a private blogspot blog for the class, and I add new students to the blog every semester. I keep adding students instead of creating a new blog for each class because I want students to see what others have written over the years -- examples of good and bad blog posts (practicing genre analysis!) help them write their own.
• Students should post eight times in the eight-week semester: 4 times before midterm and 4 times after midterm. Commenting on 3 classmates' posts can substitute for one of their own posts. They can decide when to post, but only one post per day counts. (I used to ask for weekly posts, but students would forget. And one semester, students posted all their posts at once, which defeats the purpose of getting them to think and share.)
• Posts are worth 10 points each -- totaling about 1/10th of the points for the course.
• I don't check spelling, grammar, mechanics -- the only comments I make are about analysis: simply summarizing or copying the news item is not sufficient. Students must post what they *think* about what they've read.

Overall, this semester the students have realized that technical writing is all around them. Some profess to have more respect for technical writers, seeing for the first time all the hard work that goes into creating documents at their workplaces. Here are some example student posts, just as they appeared (weird formatting, spelling errors, and all -- be sure to notice that one Ethiopian student liked a W.B. Yeats quote!):

You can Learn Writing Style- What is Techncial Writing

I received this article in my inbox this morning and thought it would be interesting to read through it since it pertains to what we have learned in our online technical writing class. This article was written by: stevesheriw. he describes technical writing as a way to inform, instruct or persuade, argue within a document. He also goes on to say that what ever you write is some form of technical writing as in resumes, memos, letters, reports, instructions, etc. Some of these forms of technical writing styles were some of our required assignments for this class which made it clear as to why they call it technical writing. Steve also points out that there are 7 steps to consider when writing a document, these steps are; Purpose, audience, content specific to it's purpose and audience, write clearly and precisely, make good use of visuals, and last but not least; be ethical in your writing.

Where have I heard this before, oh yeah, I read about it in the reading assignments and the introduction of our handbook.
http://www.technicalyp.com/?p=372

Top 5 Technical Writing Skills That Pay Big

http://technicalwriting.phoenix-blogs.com/top-5-technical-writing-skills-that-pay-big/

The article goes over the top 5 tech writing jobs that pay big- the reason that I enjoy the article is because over the past semester I have truly payed respect to technical writing. It is a field that will be around forever to meet the needs of people from all types of society. The top 5 payed jobs are as follows:

- Information design

- Information architecture

- Training material development

- Illustration

- Typography

Everyone in the class should appreciate what a vast field technical writing is. It effects everyone (especially college students) in their day to day lives! I have enjoyed the short and challenging semester of technical writing, and I truly believe that it is something that everyone should have a basic understating of. Writing skills are a necessary thing in a society that is based around commercialism.

Technical Writing involves many things that need to be considered before writing a plain draft and Audience analysis is one of them.

This article points out about the kind of audience we need to consider while writing a document. There are 3 main types of audience: a non technical, a semi-technical and a technical. Gender and age also plays a role. As a technical writer we need to focus on the audience’s interest. When considering translation into another language for the document it is even more important to write a simple but clear language to avoid meaning changes. All those information make it clear that it is hard to write a document for multiple audiences. Satisfying all the readers is a hard task.

I liked the statement of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) used in this context: “Think like a wise man but communicate in language of the people” Not only in technical writing gives this success but also in other fields of life.

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/321195_why-keeping-your-audience-in-mind-while-technical-writing-is-important

Implications for online teaching

Listen to this interesting study I just heard on American Public Media's Future Tense. It's by Dr. Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University: it seems as though workers are more likely to lie when they communicate using email than when they use hand-written notes.

Yeah, well: no big surprise for many of us who deal with academic honesty.

"Please stop confusing me!"

I've spent the last three hours of this afternoon teaching in my online technical writing course: a big assignment is due Monday at 11:59 p.m., so the usual hectic flurry of draft swapping, instructor paging, and discussion posting is happening.

This post's title is a quote from one of those students: s/he wrote it this afternoon in the Subject line of a public posting to the course website, under the "Q&A About Quizzes and Exams" section. This student has not been scoring well on the quizzes.

Now, these quizzes are completely open-book. Students can take them twice with no penalty: the highest score counts. The only constraint is that students only get 15 minutes each time to take the 10-point quizzes. Correct answers are not provided between attempts -- and I haven't been able to figure out how to provide them after the second attempt (our college's D2L CMS is woefully difficult to work).

To my mind, it's almost impossible not to get 100% on such a quiz when 1) you have all the questions after you take the quiz once and 2) you can use your textbooks. My idea in creating the quizzes this way is to get students to read the material so that they will do well with the *real* assignments for the course, which are the writing assignments. I have even given a small talk to colleagues about this quizzing philosophy/practice, calling it "Quiz to Learn," opposing it to Quiz to Test.

Anyway, this unhappy student posted the following (yes, this big block of text is exactly how it appeared):

"After reading our sections the quiz was on 3 times, i still got 6 out of ten. I Felt completely sure that two of those were correct. You become too repetitive in some instances and give us too many options. I do appreciate being given more than one chance. But how are we supposed to learn what the right answer is if it does not tell us. Would you not rather have your students get them all right, and know that they have in fact at some point learned what is correct and what is not correct. I cant say from experience, but i would prefer my students know the right answer, and possibly make the quizzes less confusing, or give less answers to certain questions, in hopes of them actually learning the material correctly. I have never taken a mutliple choice test that offers so many answers to one questionthat all sound so much alike. Especially when given a time constraint it puts us under pressure. I just want to know the correct and proper way to do things, and hopefully still get an A or B in this course. I hope the next quiz is not so confusing. Probably more so if you are giving us 3 chances! Not trying to be ude or judge your teaching styles. I just wanted to state my take on the situation. Thanks for reading. Is it not our job as students to question things?"

Don't you love the last line, with its archaic syntactic inversion to begin the question? :-) Such a wonderful rhetorical tactic.

SO Slow

The last few days, the CMS (Desire 2 Learn or D2L for short) for our online courses has been TERRIBLY slow at loading.

I'm teaching an online tech writing course, which requires almost daily input from students, and we get timed out on some of our posts. I've begun copying ALL of the messages I post (these posts are my teaching, after all!) because often when I go to "Post" on the Discussion Board, the entire system locks up.

The other challenge will be this weekend: students have their second major assignment due Monday at 11:59 p.m., which means I'll have tons of last-minute questions on Sunday. That'll be fun, to download drafts, read and comment, then upload when the system's excruciatingly slow.

Anyone else having a problem like this? It's happening both on my home computer (I have wifi) and my office computer.

When you know too much

So during the fire alarm this afternoon, I sat with a former student who's finishing a law enforcement degree at the college. She's funny, has a complicated life, and likes to talk to me about a wide range of topics.

She told me about her online course this summer, American Government, where she didn't learn a single thing. How can that be? I asked. Because the course consisted of reading and taking a weekly quiz. That's it. No interaction with other students. No feedback or conversation or discussion with the professor. She spent nearly $500.00 for this "course."

What do I do with this information? I'm breaking my neck with my online course: was in the office until 10:40 tonight uploading my first batch of graded assignments: 23 students, two or three files each to upload, minimum five minutes per student -- you do the math. These numbers don't even count the time it takes to download their written work, read it, comment on it, save it with a different file name so I can distinguish it from the ungraded work.

These numbers also do not count the time spent reading discussion postings (from the whole class and in the small groups I've set up so students can peer review each others' work), making discussion postings, writing News items, commenting on the class blog, answering questions, etc. To me, a college course means students have interaction with an instructor and with material. Is that old-fashioned?

Our union thinks that all online courses are the same. They're not. And somehow something must be done. But what?