Classes I'll Be Teaching

During the March term at Westwood's Denver South campus, I'll be teaching HUM 400, Creative and Critical Thinking. I've taught the course on campus before, but never online or in a hybrid format, as I will be this time. When I've taught the class in the past, I've selected a controversial topic for the class to examine and then required each student to follow the process on his/her own and write a paper about it. I'm thinking of using global warming as the topic this coming term.

I like to show 12 Angry Men (the original black-and-white movie, not a remake) in classes when we discuss critical thinking.

For Red Rocks, I'm currently scheduled to teach one section each of ENG 030 and 060 (developmental classes) this summer and one each of ENG 030 and 131 this fall. The section of ENG 131, Technical Writing I, will be hybrid, which will be an interesting experience. I developed and taught a technical writing class for Westwood College Online in addition to teaching it "on ground."

The Red Rocks English Department (along with some others) had a book fair on Friday where faculty could exam publishers' offerings. Choosing textbooks will be hard because there are so many options.

Just for future reference, I'm going to include the course descriptions for the Red Rocks classes here. I got them from the Colorado Community College Common Courses page.

ENG 030, Basic Writing Skills--Focuses on sentence and basic paragraph structure and development. Enables the student to review and improve grammar, usage, and punctuation skills while employing critical thinking strategies and the writing process to respond to a wide variety of writing situations.

ENG 060, Writing Fundamentals--Focuses on paragraph structure and development and introduces the formal essay. Enables the student to review and improve grammar, usage, and punctuation skills while employing critical thinking strategies and the writing process to respond to a wide variety of writing situations.

ENG 131, Technical Writing I--Develops skills one can apply to a variety of technical documents. Focuses on principles for organizing, writing, and revising clear, readable documents for industry, business, and government.

Another Haiku

The Comet

Solar-wind-blown hair
frames the crater-marked face drawn
always toward her sun.


I'm not entirely happy with it, but I've had this idea in my mind for some time.

My First Haiku

--at least it's the first one I remember writing. Yesterday I mentioned to someone that, having grown up in Missouri, one of the things I missed here in Colorado is fireflies. It occurred to me later that fireflies would be a good subject for a haiku:


Fireflies

flitting, flickering
in the darkness, delighting
enchanted children


I liked the idea of linking the words in the lines with alliteration, though the alliterating sound should be on stressed syllables, which it isn't in delighting in the second line.

Technical Writing and Web 2.0

The theme for the January issue of Intercom was technical writing and Web 2.0. The best articles were "Writing and Web 2.0," "Podcasting: A New Layer of Communication," and "Using Wikis."

In "Writing and Web 2.0," Keith Hoffman discussed social networking, AJAX-based web sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS, as well as web-based word processing. There are several items in his list of "Suggested Readings" that I'd like to look at.

The authors of "Using Wikis," Brenda Huettner and Char James-Tanny, along with M. Katherine Brown, have used a wiki, It's a Wiki Wacky World, to write a book titled Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools. I bought a copy of their book, along with copies of Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration by Jane Klobas, which I've already read, and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Change Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

These should be useful for the formal report assignment I'm planning for my technical writing class.

I decided that to find time to read these books and others related to my work, I had to stop reading the murder mysteries I was getting from the library.

Handouts for RRCC Classes

I finally got smart and moved the Word files with handouts I've created for my Red Rocks classes to folders at Box.net. I had been uploading them to the WebCT course shells, but that meant I had to create each folder and upload each file for ENG 090 three times, once for each section. With the folders at Box.net, I only have to do it once for all three sections. I also had trouble opening the files from WebCT; I'm hoping it will be easier this way.

Writing versus Literature and Humanities

I finally realized (duh!) this week that I'd much rather teach literature and humanities courses than writing classes. Of course, that's what most of my classes are in. I'm working on my c.v. so, hopefully, I can apply to some other colleges or universities to teach more classes in those areas.

I also wouldn't mind teaching some poetry-writing classes, though I probably need to do more poetry writing myself. All that I've done recently has been lyrics for political songs, and I did that more than a year and a half ago.

The other day, I did write another poem that is less political. I was going to make all the lines end in a rhyme with weary, but I decided to break that up:


Snow Weary

skies dreary
eyes bleary--
kids cheery
snowballs forming

still leery
of “theory,”
my query:
global warming?


I do like the way the title rhymes with most of the lines as well as the way I used punctuation but no verbs.

I'm going to have to start carrying a notebook with me so I can do some writing when I have the time--or the inspiration.

Technical Writing Textbook

When I taught technical writing for Westwood College, we used Technical Report Writing Today by Riordan (Houghton Mifflin), and others for earlier editions. I liked the book, but when I needed to select a book for my class at Red Rocks, I picked Technical Communication (8th ed.) by Mike Markel (Bedford/St. Martin's). I'm beginning to regret that decision.

First, I don't care for Markel's definition of technical communication as "workplace communication" There's a lot more to it than that.

Second, when he presents the writing process, he treats technical documents the same as any writing assignment the students would do for a class. He leaves out considerations of budget, deadlines, publication, distribution, etc.

I didn't care too much for Riordan's definition either, but he did a good job of covering the writing process as it occurs in the workplace.

In Riordan's last edition (9th), the page layout was changed so there are wide outside margins. I didn't care for that or the effort to expand the textbook to cover technical "communication" instead of technical writing despite the title. I also don't agree with his assertion in the first chapter (an addition to the latest edition) that "technical writing is global." I also wish he had a chapter on fliers, brochures, and similar documents.

However, I may go back to his book the next time I teach the class.

Web 2.0 and Teaching Technical Writing

I think I've finally figured out how to incorporate some of the new internet technology (web 2.0) into my technical writing class. I want the students to write formal reports, and I've decided to have them collaborate on that assignment. I believe what I'll do is assign each group one of the following to research and report on:

• blogs
• wikis
• RSS feeds
• podcasting
• free and open-source software

In their reports, they would include how this particular type of communication or technology is or can be used in business, as well as how to find and use it.

Web 2.0

I think I first read a reference to web 2.0 in one of the blogs I subscribed to in Bloglines. According to the article on "Web 2.0" in Wikipedia, the phrase web 2.0, which was "coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users."

About a month ago in a blog entry on O'Reilly Radar, Tim O'Reilly offered a definition of web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collective intelligence.")

In an article posted in September of 2005, "What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software," O'Reilly tried to explain what is meant by web 2.0. In this article, he explored seven principles:

1. The Web As Platform
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence
3. Data is the Next Intel Inside
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
7. Rich User Experiences

I'm still not sure I understand all of the technical terminology, but I'm interested in learning more. The issue of Intercom I received last week is about web 2.0 and writing.

Apparently, there's also web 3.0.

Using Blogs in Technical Writing Classes

In the September/October issue of Intercom (the STC magazine), there was an article by Tom H. Johnson titled "Corporate Blogging and the Technical Writier." I'm going to be teaching a technical writing class this coming semester at Red Rocks Community College, and reading the article got me thinking about how to use blogs in my class. I don't think I want to go so far yet as to have each student create and maintain a blog for the semester, but I'm considering including a group project where students study how blogs are used.

The article referred to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, which is a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have blogs. This might be a good starting point, especially since it includes a list of sample blogs from the companies.

I also read the first couple of chapters of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers before I had to return it to the library. I've reserved it again because I think it might be useful in planning this assignment.

At the end of the article, Johnson referred to a couple of studies that I want to look at:

• "Corporate Blogging: Is It Worth the Hype?"
• "Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal?"

I've included them in my bookmarks at del.icio.us.

Purpose of This Blog

After Richardson's book, I read Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to the Blogosphere by David F. Warlick. I didn't find it as useful, but it also helped inspire me to start this blog. I'm planning to use it to keep a record of my reading and ideas relating to my teaching, mostly writing but also some math.

More recently I read Wikis: Tools for Information Work And Collaboration by Jane Klobas and others. It's a great reference to have on hand; unfortunately, it costs almost $60, so I had to settle for checking it out of the library, though I would like to own a copy. The authors created a wiki to accompany the book. It includes an overview of the book and a page for each chapter. I just wish it provided more information, especially the links in the book.

Inspiration for Teaching and Blogging

In November I read Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. At the time I was thinking about changing careers, but this book inspired me to continue teaching. In the book, Richardson covers

• the read/write web
• weblogs
• wikis
• RSS
• social bookmarking
• images online
• podcasting and screencasting

What got me most excited was reading about blogs, wikis (which I'd only learned of a few weeks earlier), and RSS feeds and the ideas I had for using them in my classes, particularly the research writing classes (particularly ENG 122 at Red Rocks) that I frequently teach.

Unfortunately, I'm not scheduled to teach ENG 122 this coming semester, but as soon as I do again, I want to use what I learned from Richardson by having the students create and maintain their own blogs to record their research and establish an account where they can track RSS feeds from sites relating to their topics. I'm also thinking about creating a class wiki about research, from generating research questions to documentation styles but focusing on reviews of search engines, metacrawlers, directories, and other internet research tools. When I taught ENG 122 last year, I had the students demonstrate search engines and metacrawlers in class. I want to expand that assignment in the future to include, at least, directories, and to have the students in groups develop criteria for evaluating research tools, select the best examples, demonstrate the ones selected, and record their decisions and reviews in the wiki.

I also intend to establish a blog or blogs for the on-campus classes (as opposed to online and blended/hybrid) I teach to communicate with students. There are a couple of full-time faculty members at Red Rocks who have their ENG 121 (essay writing) students create blogs, but I'm not ready to go that far with my classes this semester: ENG 090 (developmental essay writing), ENG 121, and ENG 131 (technical writing). I do think it would be appropriate to do something with blogs and wikis in my technical writing class; I just haven't figured out what.

As a result of reading Richardson's book, I established an account with Bloglines to keep track of blogs related to my work. I also created an account with Furl, but I decided to switch to del.icio.us and will be closing out the Furl account. I used to have a lot of bookmarks for my classes (primarily research related) in an account with MyBookmarks, but when I didn't use it for a few months, it was closed, and I lost all the links I'd collected. At least with del.icio.us, I can backup my bookmarks. I think the tags are interesting, but I'd really prefer a more hierarchical method of organization: folders within folders.