THATCamp Community College 2015 Notes

Here are my notes from the day. We had a small group for THATCampCC, so instead of sessions we had a longer conversation where we bounced around discussing the proposals campers had made in the morning. We did something like that last year as well and I believe this might be something we continue in the future.

• We began by discussing doing peer review outside the classroom.
  • Can we do meaningful peer review outside the classroom?
  • Building student bonds outside of class.
  • Students need to learn good criticism skills to be better peer reviewers.
  • Chris Gazzara suggested having students review a paper like they would a film or book.
  • Collaborate is a Blackboard tool for peer review.
  • VoiceThread is an app for leaving comments.
  • SHOULD statements important during peer review.
• We then discussed prior formative non-stressful learning assessments.
  • Differences between scaffolding and expectations.
  • Can visuals help with assessing prior knowledge?
  • How women use Instagram to bypass the male gaze and invent safe spaces to present themselves.
  • How information literacy is taught at different schools in the room.
  • I discussed cutting down on secondary source requirements.
• We then discussed annotating silent films, which led to a wide ranging discussion.
  • ContentDM and Omeka.
  • Betzwood is a project of Montgomery Community College
  • Reclaim Hosting does Omeka installs.
  • We also discussed the work of Jane Mcgonigal and Jill Walker-Rettberg.

ThatCamp Community College: How Technology Affects The Form & Logic Of Composition Writing

• How to bridge gaps between the two required composition courses here at BCC.
• How to deal with differences between hypothesis and thesis?
• How to deal with creative students versus those who need more formal training?
• Differences between peer review via wikis versus Google Drive.
• Reader versus writer based feedback.
• Peer review speed dating.
• Class size is a concern for face to face versus digital peer review.
• Bias versus agenda in secondary sources.
• How do we teach what is RIGHT about a source?

#RThink

Last summer, I was thrilled to be asked to return to Stockton for the #RThink (Rethinking Thoughts) conference. The afternoon was spent among old friends and some very interesting and eager students. The Literature program at Stockton is in great hands.

Here are my notes from the day: 

• Twitter hashtag=#rthink

• Creating a New Media certificate

• Students would create a portfolio that could be shown to employers/schools/etc

• New Media assignments should be memorable

• Allowing students to make up their project (see Kinsella senior seminar in the spring) gives students agency over their work and which projects they worked on)

• I allow my students to have a say over their paper topics. We brew them in class during discussions. This gives them ownership over their writing.

• I also mentioned the “Peer Review Speed Dating” that I do

• Giving students options for New Media assignments is important

• Could do a podcast or book signing or calendar or newsletter

• There was some discussion of the good ole pop-up projects

• I have thought about using those in my classes.

• What is the role of service learning in all of this?

• Something Tom said gave me a great idea for an assignment for my Composition II classes

• About half way through short story period (which is first 6-7 weeks) have students pick a YouTube song that relates to a story we have read.

• Write a 500 word essay about the song and story.

• For example, if we read The Yellow Wallpaper, I would pick Systematic Death by Crass
  

• Live experience of tweeting shared reading of a chapter/scene/etc

• I think this would work best in an online class

• Create an “exhibition” of it via Storify

• An idea I loved was putting together an epub of the best work of a class

• Students could be involved in the curation and editing process

• General consensus in the room of “what good is one more essay?”

Peer Review Speed Dating

Something new I tried this past semester in all of my classes was “Peer Review Speed Dating” for paper revisions. I saw a presentation at a conference about it once, but Prof Hacker’s post about it in November was the primary catalyst for adding it to my courses.

Here’s how it worked for me: I asked students to bring two printed copies, or their laptop, of their paper. On our Mt. Laurel campus, classrooms are already set up in long rows, so setting up “stations” wasn’t a problem, but in Pemberton we had to move chairs to set up eight stations. I assigned a student to each station and told the other students to move to each station every five minutes. I kept a timer on my cell phone. After a student passed by each station, they would release someone at a station so that student could go around. At the end, each student end up at my station, where I looked over their paper.

I thought this went really well. A lot of underperforming students were able to get advice from not only me, but from others in the class. In a few classes, long lines formed at certain students’ stations that were deemed by the class to be doing well in the course. Sometimes I think it is important to hear something needs improvement from not only an instructor, but from another student as well.

Problems: In some courses, I had a lot of students skipped the session. I have decided in the future to make participation in this session part of their course contribution grade. I also had two students in one class slip out after I looked at their paper. Some late students did not get a chance, depending on their class size, to get around the room all the way. I did not have much sympathy for those students or those who forgot to print their paper and had to waste time running to a computer lab.

For my Composition I classes, I had three different class sizes, so I could see different ways that this can be done in the future. In the first one, I only had nine students show up (that is about how many passed as well), so we just passed papers around the room at the five minute intervals. The informal nature of this setting really worked with that group. Two of the classes were around 15-20 students and easily got everyone in during our longer final exam week schedule. My English Literature I class had over 20 (probably around 25) show up, which complicated matters a bit. We decided in that class to put two students at each station, which allowed more students to get around the room before the time expired.

ThatCamp Philadelphia: Digital Scholarship & The Unpress

A newer member of the Stockton family, Adeline Koh, ran a session on digital scholarship that was equally interesting and very engaging. Being off of the tenure track, and not at a university, I had a different perspective than some others brought to it. Others like Amanda French, who aren’t teaching right now, brought a unique perspective as well.

• Ulyssesseen.com is an app for Ulysses. Cool.
• Big question about whether digital publications count towards tenure.
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obselence and Shakespeare Quarterly’s move to open peer review are brought up.
• Deb Gussman asks for a definition of what “open access” means.
• Cost and institutional support are important.
• Siobhan Phillips asks about differences in cost between open and closed peer review.
• How much worth do you get out of a two year process for a scholarly journal?
• I blurt out “very little!”
• Amanda French asks at what point in the process should peer review come in?
• Creating an epub is so easy now. I need to create an epub/mobi of my MA thesis.
• Amanda also mentioned Press Forward.
• Deb about two big factors in self publication…moving from format to format and lessening interest over time…
• Siobhan Phillips had a great idea about having organizations in various fields creating open access bibliographies.
• Discipline loyalties are more important than institutional loyalties.
• Because I am not on tenure track, I definitely have different relationships to these issues than others in the room. I mentioned that I don’t feel comfortable publishing in something that couldn’t easily be accessed by my grandparents and there was definitely some amused looks. Whatever. I’d rather people have access to my work than worry about being “legitimate” or whatever.
• Gussman wonders if outside tenure review can be applied to peer review? Digital Humanities Quarterly already does I believe.
• Amanda and I discussed the impact of self published or open access published works. We both get comments, emails, and know where readers are coming from.
• Janine Utell: Decide what your career could look like and make best case you can.

Adeline's notes on the white board. 

A good shot of some of the room including Siobhan, Deb, Adeline, and my TweetDeck. 

Amanda and Adeline listen to Janine Utell speak near the end of the session.