We are beyond whiteboard shots. We are also soon to be beyond research mode as all initial sources will be compiled by Friday, June 3, 2011, at midnight.
The second round of research presentations were more polished and much tighter. With technical difficulties at a minimum, we breezed through all scheduled student presentations, many of which offered various and sundry social roles of writing teachers. Here's a quick sample:
- DJ
- tech proselytizer
- manipulator
- activist
- indoctrinator
- Nostradamus
- model composer
- historian
- master/apprentice
- parent
- mentor
- listener
- humorist
- architect
- other
- body
- stranger
- whatever
If/where any of these social roles appear in our book is up to each researcher/writer pair, who will also need to come up with chapter titles. Among the potential chapter titles drafted in my presentation notes, two stand out: "The Pedagogical is Political" and "Those Who Can't..." The researcher/writer pairs focusing respectively on special considersations and how others determine the social role of writing teachers are welcome to use.
I sabotaged my own presentations by forgetting my USB, but this was an actual benefit as it allowed for more discussion about potential writing locations. Meet on campus? Our assigned room? The library? Computer writing classroom? Or meet downtown? Bar? Coffeeshop? With a tentative agreement to converge on the Torch at 530PM, the Week 4 session ended. However, at least three researcher/writer pairs stayed more than 10 minutes after being dismissed to brainstorm aloud about their chapters.
Prior to this week's session was some discussion on Twitter about the lack of conversation about the collaborative authoring project. Although 2/3 of the class are on Twitter, only a couple students discussed the course and/or used the #560wr hashtag. While some (myself included) may have been too impatient about this and/or too quick to disappointment, I'm concerned about the lack of a work record. As observed by one student, there really hasn't been much discussion about anything project-related outside of the weekly face-to-face meetings. Perhaps the biggest benefit so far in using Google Docs is its revision history. This allowed me to restore significant parts of the research pool that had been deleted by accident, but the revision history also provides a kind of record of when contributors did their work. If/when I conduct a collaborative authoring project again, I'll see about setting up a workstreaming service.
Both the research pool blog and GooDoc are kind of a mess right now, each revealing an unfortunate assumption or expectation I once held. With the blog, I assumed tags pertinent to our agreed-upon chapters would arise in a natural way. With the GooDoc, I expected the color-coded order I attempted to impose would be enough as a guiding principle of organization. As neither of these proved true, some housekeeping is in order. Also, given technology issues some students have had in working with Google Docs, the research pool probably should have developed in a blog setting first. Having all source information in one place was a good idea; having it all in just one GooDoc was not a good idea.