XplanaZine

Yesterday I asked: how can we make online learning worth the risk? I’ll start with what for many students is the biggest risk of all: making your work for the class public. It’s a big risk. American university culture is intensely private - and grades are the most private information of all. Students are used to taking tests that only the teacher sees, writing papers that only the teacher sees, all for a grade that is a secret shared between the teacher and student.

Yet at the same time that this privacy protects the student, it also creates a kind of falseness and futility about everything that they do. It limits them to the judgment of one person, and one person only: the teacher. In a classroom of dozens, even hundreds of fellow students, each student usually tends to feel very alone.

This has the most severe consequences, I would argue, for student writing. It is not likely that a student’s quiz or exam would naturally find a larger audience. With few exceptions, quizzes and exams are usually quite tedious. But writing assignments are intended for an audience, and by denying the student an audience for their writing, we have done them an enormous disservice. Some of the motivation for that choice has been entirely practical: teachers who have done peer-review writing have always had to grapple with the logistics of getting copies of each paper, distributing them, finding ways to share comments, and so on. The Internet changes all of that.

In my Online Folklore-Mythology class every student begins to publish webpages in the second or third week of class, and begins work on a semester-long writing project starting around the fifth week of class. The students choose projects of interest to them, and these projects are then visited by other students in the class. These students, in turn, leave comments and suggests for the author of the project in the Discussion Board that is part of our course management system (Blackboard). Students publish their work on the web; students get feedback from other students via the web. And the quality of the work, and the efforts that the students make, are simply dazzling.

This is even more striking because the large majority of students have never published webpages before. In a class of 30, I am lucky to have 4 or 5 who have ever published webpages before; usually there are not more than 2 or 3 who have any experience with this. Many of the students balk at publishing these webpages - the fear of risk, and fear of failure, is strong. But as teachers we can help - we must help - our students to overcome that fear.

The first semester that I tried this technique was in a classroom-based class when I offered students the option of publishing their web projects online. About half the students in class took me up on it! And we had a great tim. I was just a beginner at web publishing then myself, so we muddled through all kinds of adventures. One student still continues to update and maintain his project from that class - the “Stick-Figure Iliad” - four years later. Another student captured everyone’s imagination by creating a clickable Homeric warrior: he took a figure from a Greek vase painting of a fallen warrior, and created an image map so that you could click on any part of the warrior’s body and be taken to a passage from the Iliad where someone was killed or wounded in that part of the body.

Then, at the end of the semester, the students who were turning in their traditional written papers were visibly downcast - they realized that their papers had been tedious to write, and would be pretty tedious for me to read as well. After all, what is an 8-10 page paper compared to a clickable Homeric warrior? Several of the students remarked in their course evaluations that semester how much they wished they had chosen to do a web project. The only reason they had not done it was because it was something new, and they were scared.

Ever since, I have required students in the Mythology-Folklore class to publish their class project on the web. And I have never regretted it. Every student manages to make a unique individual contribution to the class in this way, a contribution that is valued by their fellow students - who tell them so. Indeed, the students find affirmation from one another that they would not necessarily find from me: I do not appreciate how cool and intricate their references to Japanese anime might be, I am a fan of the movie The Matrix but have not adopted Neo as my personal savior, I really don’t like colored backgrounds or animated gifs at all. But because the students share so much common culture, they respond with sometimes remarkable enthusiasm to one another’s work. Recent quotes from the Comments section of the Discussion Board include some of the following:

• I really like the Digital Blasphemy site. That guy’s pictures are awesome. Virtual Tourist is neat, too. I wish there were a tour of Tokyo, where one of my friends lives! She doesn’t take enough pictures to satisfy my curiosity.
• Aliens, wow very cool! I have a friend whose entire apartment is covered in little green heads with big eyes. lol She would be very proud of your site!
• I love the GIF that you have on your homepage, with the ufo’s zooming by.
• your homepage ROCKS! I loaded it up and those creepy eyes were staring at me.. very neat. The font also catches the mood perfectly, where did you find it?
• I love the purple, cloudy background on your intro page. I have read the first two stories on your webpage, the story of the creation, and of the finding of the fire. I think that your stories flow very well into speech, and I can just hear someone telling these stories.
• First of all I wanna say good colors and great GIF. I really liked the bird. I have some stuff like that on mine but without the fancy background. Did you put that background on there on purpose to give the bird in the sky effect? Cause it worked:)

There is no way as an instructor responding to the students’ work that I could give them the depth and range of appreciation that they receive from their fellow students. Not to mention that the other students are learning new and different things as they read through these various projects.

So yes, it represents an enormous amount of work for the teacher: imagine if you had to teach your students to use a word-processor from scratch if you wanted them to type their papers instead of hand-writing them. That’s what it’s like. Given the low level of computer literacy among students today, I spend a fair large amount of time with the students working with them on learning how to create and publish webpages. Yet, in the end, the time that I spend doing that is far less than the time it would have taken me to provide such rich and varied responses to my students. Once they can put their writing online, sharing it with the other students, the possibilities for learning are enormously expanded.

Not to mention the absolute sense of accomplish that students experience when they learn how to publish their webpages. Here is a typical email that I received from a student who, after much struggle, finally got the hang of publishing:

ok i checked it online and it works!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yeah for me, thank you so much… i really appreciate you working with me!!!!!!

I would say that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is a sign of risk worth taking, and of the value of success. Obviously, when students can publish their work online, all kinds of good things happen.

Tomorrow: just what about writing for the web is different from the traditional kind of writing that students usually do in school?