The outside resources sent to us by Dr. Rice- the article on using text expansion software and blog about digital media and oratory- have shaped the direction of this week’s blog. I am interested in the question of how technology in teaching might change the way students receive grades and comments on their own texts, and the way educators respond to student texts as graders. As I have grade assignments, I wonder how the students will receive my comments. I think about whether or not they will click on those links that will transfer them to Bedford to explain those common problems, or if the layers of this process will distance them from examining their own error. This made think about how they interact with their documents as a whole since they are only used to receiving feedback only on handwritten or word-processed printed out documents. Does the Raiderwriter interface distance them at all from their own writing when they look at their assignment? In the same way that many CI’s have commented on feeling distanced from their students in the grading process, do students become distances from their own work working with it in a strictly digital capacity? I am not suggesting that the Raiderwriter software is ineffective or that this transition to dealing with their texts as digital media isn’t a necessary one, but that these possible impacts should be considered.
On the teacher aspect of technologically aided grading- I was thinking about the “Using Text-Expansion Software to Respond to Student Writing” article. This writer’s creation of quick links for grammatical issues so that he can take a longer time on content implies a preference of content over form. His desire to spend more time on this aspect of student papers suggests that grading grammar is an inconvenient stage that must be gotten through in order to get to the more substantial portion of a grader’s responsibilities- content and delivery. I do not disagree with this approach or favoring of content- I lean the same way myself. What I am interested in is why if many composition educators (as indicated in the many respondents to the post which reflected similar grading strategies) are distancing themselves from highly formulaic approaches to writing in terms of time spent on grading components, how is this reflected in their teaching? How much time do they spend on grammar in the classroom? How do they weight grammar in the grade as a whole? A grader’s relationship with technology also reveals specific value systems for composition pedagogy. A system like RaiderWriter is not only a practical tool for grading such a large number of papers, but within its very structure and interface reveals composition preferences. There’s no real conclusion here, just awareness that the tools we use to grade reflect composition priorities and should be evaluated as well as teaching and composition tools.
Focusing on just the first paragraph, I think what distances them from their comments more so than the electronic media is the fact that there is no ability to build assignment-to-assignment in our program. I think this takes away from all grader responses because the student will not be doing anything else with the paper so the comments are just used to bicker about grades they received more than how they can apply them to the next assignment or fix/work on their writing's universal error.
ReplyDeleteScott has an interesting point about not being able to revise their assignments, though I think that since the assignments do build in the way that BA3, 4, and 5 are ultimately combining to create Draft 1.1 (and that one is sort of revisable, in a sense) I think that the comments could be used for future writing assignments.
ReplyDeleteMegan, what you say about grammar, though, is interesting too. I honestly have had no time in class to talk about grammar, and I haven't really worried much about it.
I think grammar is something that is accomplished as soon as the writer really wants to learn it. I learned how to avoid comma splices when I sat down and learned it. I used to have students get in groups, learn how to use a piece of punctuation, and then teach it to the class. They usually mastered the punctuation they were assigned and didn't learn anything from the other grammar groups.
If students can learn how to use iTunes, Facebook, and iPhones, they can learn how to use punctuation. It's just that they have a mind block telling them that they can't. They aren't the kind of a person to be a "grammarian" a.k.a. a super nerd. But they are all capable of sitting down in an afternoon and looking at examples until it makes sense.