I was at a session for writing instructors today; we were discussing whether we could actually teach students how to edit their writing. As we talked about our various approaches, I remembered the room I boarded in my last year as an undergrad. I remembered how small it was and how the roof sloped over the bed so I had to be careful sitting up or I could bang my head. I remembered the really small table and how I did my editing on the floor, on the throw rug, usually after midnight before the day of the class it was due.
I would have books from my university library or the local one piled on my bed. I would have recipe cards with the names of the books I was quoting from and/or using in my bibliography in a pile to the side. I would have another pile of cards with useful quotes copied out onto them fanned out in front of me on the rug I was kneeling on. Lots of blank pages and scotch tape would be in front of me too, and my rough draft on my knees as I cut it into stripes so I could restructure it. I would lay out the stripes of paper and the cards with my quotes in the order I thought would 'work', then I would read through the collection and rearrange it a few times, before finalizing. I would write out new bits in between and then tape the stripes or cards that fit in next on the page. I would end up with several very messy, floppy pages, carefully numbered so I wouldn't get the order confused.
Then I would move to the small table that served as my desk, get some fresh paper, and begin copying out my essay by hand, on every other line. I hated doing the bibliography; I could never remember where the periods, commas and semi-colons went, and I couldn't believe it was all that important. And I knew I was a poor speller but often defiently refused to look up words. (At 3:00 a.m. I often felt defiant.) I used White Out too often, and did the covering page last, often as the sun was rising. Then I had breakfast and staggered through the day until whenever class was, when I handed in my essay in person, as required. Then I crashed!
I suspect some of today's students have a somewhat similar pattern in terms of timing. But let's look at some of the details of their process. Today almost all students will have, or have access to, a computer, and their rough draft will be written using a word processor. They will also use the computer for research, using the web to access web sites, some available on the open web, but also some found using Google Scholar or other academic search engines. Some will use Google Scholar as a portal into their university's online resources and journals, if their university has added their library to the Google network, and if the students have their student number and the password. Some will order books, using the deep selection available online through sites like Amazon and Indigo rather than local bookstores. Some will have books from the library, but chances are they will use the web to check and see if the book was available and perhaps to put a hold on it.
Some students will be using their del.icio.us account or some other social bookmarking application to collect their online resources and tag them with helpful labels, including, perhaps, the name of the course or the essay topic. Some of the more (web 2.0) sophisticated students may be using the research tool, Zotero, a free Firefox extension.
Even if they find Zotero too web bound for their taste, they will be writing up their notes and drafts using a word processor. Copying and re-copying text writing by hand or by typing is just too onerous. They will copy & paste, not kneeling on the floor using scissors, paper, recipe cards and scotch tape, but by using keystrokes or clicking on menus. They won't be getting defiant about their spelling, they will just right click on the words underlined in red, and then click on the correct (we hope) word to replace it. They need to learn new skills with this new tool, like making sure that the word they chose is, indeed, the word they mean. And they will have to be taught to double-check what happened when they copied & pasted. It's way too easy to leave a word dangling or the wrong form of the verb sitting there after the copy & paste, (especially at 3:00 a.m.!)
When they get close to the final draft, today's students should be pushed to print their work up, read it out loud looking for typos, and doing a final proof-reading to make corrections. When they have made the corrections, they need to make sure they have the font specified by the professor, and the line-spacing. There are more things to check for in word-processing, even though it looks neater and, therefore, deceptively as if it is correct.
The title page can be done minimally, or almost graphically designed, if the student is sophisticated enough to understand that it will likely influence the prof's attitude toward the paper even before he or she reads it. And what about the bibliography? Even if today's students haven't taken the time to use Zotero's many tutorials to learn how to use it to cite, there are ways to make creating a Works Cited or Bibliography section that are much easier than I had it back in the pre-web days.
BibMe is one of the many web-based automatic bibliography-makers that makes this final stage much easier.
Getting to class and turning the essay in isn't the same either. Some profs, sometimes, accept the essay by email, which means that s soon as today's student attaches the final file and hits "Send", it's bedtime!
In the years since I was a student the phenomenological aspect of writing an essay has changed phenomenologically! Do those assigning and/or teaching writing understand that and help the students cope with these differences?
Showing posts with label teaching writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching writing. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Tagging - For Organizing Information
One of the most important aspects of the web today is a way of organizing information called tagging (or, on Blogger, labelling). You could say that tagging is the child of alphabetical indexing - a post-Gutenberg information management invention - and hyperlinking - a web networking development. You can see what this looks like in the tag cloud pictured below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29 (If you want to learn about Web 2.0, you can click on the link to Wikipedia and then click on the various hyperlinked terms in the image to read the Wikipedia definitions. The size indicates how often each is used.)
A Very Small History Lesson
Humans spoke before we wrote and for centuries we dealt with information by remembering, sometimes using memory aids like rhyme, rhythm, and formulaic storytelling. Then writing developed, and people could note down information, and compose stories. Sacred writings passed wisdom along the generational chain, with "books" being tied together into one unit, no matter what their subject matter. A small elite of those who could read and write formed, and were usually part of a priesthood devoted to preserving, accumulating, and passing along the wisdom. All the "books" were hand-copied and some priests had books virtually memorized, but that didn't create the absolute uniformity that came with the printed word.
from - http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/4200/4255/printing-press_1.htm
When the printing press was invented, exact copies could be made, and human interventions, mistakes and alterations didn't cause variations among copies. Reading, in the European world was still associated with the sacred, although universal literacy was seen as a way to allow everyone to have immediate connection with the Holy Scriptures rather than having to go through a hierarchy of priests. With the growth of universal literacy, many other developments followed, including the ability to "read" (and interpret) the same texts differently, which created dissent. People began to reproduce books other than scriptures, and thus to share and spread philosophical and scientific thought, which sped up "progress" and led to even more differing opinions.
For scholars and readers, other developments were built on the uniformity of the books being published using a printing press. In order to avoid reading a whole book while looking for one piece of information, the organizational development that most links (pun intended) to tagging was developed.
While information and ideas were being discovered, collected, and published, readers began to want to read just parts of (non-narrative) books. Now that many people could read books where the pages always stayed the same, it became easier to manage information. Scholars started creating categories, or taxonomies, so they could find specific information quickly and completely. They began using indexes at the ends of books, and alphabetizing these indexes; it was worth the time it took for someone to index the information in a book to make it more accessible to the many readers of the book.
It quickly became essential for any learner to learn how to use indexes in books and in libraries, and systems of organizing information developed as rigid categories were set up, and people learned how to use them.
With the arrival of the World Wide Web came the possibilities of hyperlinking. Taxonomies & alphabetical indexing (top down hierarchically controlled) plus hyperlinking (giving choice in reading/viewing paths)combined and in Web 2.0 tagging was born.
I use tagging for my blog posts, to make it easier for readers to search for the topics that interest them. However, the real power of tagging, for me, comes with my online bookmarks. I use del.icio.us - to collect website addresses, URLs, for future reference. I use words or phrases that have meaning for me as keywords. Sometimes when I'm adding a site to my del.icio.us account, a tag may be a general topic, like, say, "social_bookmarking" or it might be highly idiosyncratic, like the course code of a course I teach, or I might add both plus the name of a friend whom I'll send the link to next week, or all of them. For example,
While I check through the blogs I follow, using my feed reader, I don't read them in full, but I do add the relevant ones to my del.icio.us account, and now have an extensive collection of tags -
far more than I can show you in a screen shot. They are an invaluable resource, and they are named for my interests and needs, not according to a rigid and prescribed set of terms.
Tagging is a new and highly useful way to organize information, a method that didn't exist, before the web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29 (If you want to learn about Web 2.0, you can click on the link to Wikipedia and then click on the various hyperlinked terms in the image to read the Wikipedia definitions. The size indicates how often each is used.)
A Very Small History Lesson
Humans spoke before we wrote and for centuries we dealt with information by remembering, sometimes using memory aids like rhyme, rhythm, and formulaic storytelling. Then writing developed, and people could note down information, and compose stories. Sacred writings passed wisdom along the generational chain, with "books" being tied together into one unit, no matter what their subject matter. A small elite of those who could read and write formed, and were usually part of a priesthood devoted to preserving, accumulating, and passing along the wisdom. All the "books" were hand-copied and some priests had books virtually memorized, but that didn't create the absolute uniformity that came with the printed word.
from - http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/4200/4255/printing-press_1.htm
When the printing press was invented, exact copies could be made, and human interventions, mistakes and alterations didn't cause variations among copies. Reading, in the European world was still associated with the sacred, although universal literacy was seen as a way to allow everyone to have immediate connection with the Holy Scriptures rather than having to go through a hierarchy of priests. With the growth of universal literacy, many other developments followed, including the ability to "read" (and interpret) the same texts differently, which created dissent. People began to reproduce books other than scriptures, and thus to share and spread philosophical and scientific thought, which sped up "progress" and led to even more differing opinions.
For scholars and readers, other developments were built on the uniformity of the books being published using a printing press. In order to avoid reading a whole book while looking for one piece of information, the organizational development that most links (pun intended) to tagging was developed.
While information and ideas were being discovered, collected, and published, readers began to want to read just parts of (non-narrative) books. Now that many people could read books where the pages always stayed the same, it became easier to manage information. Scholars started creating categories, or taxonomies, so they could find specific information quickly and completely. They began using indexes at the ends of books, and alphabetizing these indexes; it was worth the time it took for someone to index the information in a book to make it more accessible to the many readers of the book.
It quickly became essential for any learner to learn how to use indexes in books and in libraries, and systems of organizing information developed as rigid categories were set up, and people learned how to use them.
With the arrival of the World Wide Web came the possibilities of hyperlinking. Taxonomies & alphabetical indexing (top down hierarchically controlled) plus hyperlinking (giving choice in reading/viewing paths)combined and in Web 2.0 tagging was born.
I use tagging for my blog posts, to make it easier for readers to search for the topics that interest them. However, the real power of tagging, for me, comes with my online bookmarks. I use del.icio.us - to collect website addresses, URLs, for future reference. I use words or phrases that have meaning for me as keywords. Sometimes when I'm adding a site to my del.icio.us account, a tag may be a general topic, like, say, "social_bookmarking" or it might be highly idiosyncratic, like the course code of a course I teach, or I might add both plus the name of a friend whom I'll send the link to next week, or all of them. For example,
While I check through the blogs I follow, using my feed reader, I don't read them in full, but I do add the relevant ones to my del.icio.us account, and now have an extensive collection of tags -
far more than I can show you in a screen shot. They are an invaluable resource, and they are named for my interests and needs, not according to a rigid and prescribed set of terms.
Tagging is a new and highly useful way to organize information, a method that didn't exist, before the web.
Monday, December 17, 2007
The Good and the Bad News About Teaching Writing
Now that I am no longer buried in teaching and marking, I can begin to read (and learn) from my favorite blogs again. Here, through a link from my favorite information disseminater, Stephen Downes, is a clear honest evaluation about the state of writing, and teaching writing, and why this is important in the overall scheme of things, by Michael Umphrey. Please read it!
How to Improve the Teaching of Writing/
How to Improve the Teaching of Writing/
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