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| The Keywords Kiosk: Instructors Exchange |
| Steven Tobias (UCLA, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow) taught two courses at the University of Washington in Winter 2008 using the Keywords Collaboratory: English 328 and English 350 (click for syllabi). Below, he offers a pedagogical frame for the work he asked his students to produce during an 11-week quarter. You can read a sample of the work his students produced in the Keywords Kiosk. |
| During the first week of class, students
signed up online in small groups of three to five students. Each group
became responsible for tracking two keywords, on two separate wiki
pages. Every student was required to post twice on each of her group's
two pages, every week. Students had a significant amount of latitude
in deciding what form these posts might take. A “post” might
involve adding text, modifying existing text, adding photos, embedding
relevant internal or external links, or organizing a page’s overall
layout. Regardless of the form their posts took, students were required
to explain any modification they made to their two sites in corresponding
“discussion” areas. Giving students some freedom regarding what constituted a post encouraged collaboration. At least at first, students were frequently uneasy about directly modifying each other’s writing. (It wasn’t something they were used to doing and it seemed vaguely impolite, if not overtly critical, in the negative sense of the word.) Students were less hesitant, however, to add a textual example or a relevant image to an existing post. As they became more comfortable using their pages’ discussion areas, they increasingly relied on these forums to justify modifications they made to each other’s work. This practice not only gave students “permission” to make changes to their peers’ work, but also forced them to reflect collectively on their sites and to discuss their future development. The typical form(s) that posts took significantly changed over the quarter—as students built confidence in their public writing, began to feel more comfortable working with a wiki platform, and came to understand and embrace more fully a keywords–driven approach to literature. These evolving factors combined with students’ diverse writing, editing, computer, and graphic skills to give many of the pages an organic and, oftentimes, distinctive feel. As the quarter progressed, groups not only took increasing ownership over their pages’ content, organization, and design, but also began to teach other groups about site development. If students integrated a new feature into one of their pages, they pushed other groups to incorporate similar innovations into their own projects. This give and take created a classroom culture of intellectual and conceptual risk-taking. I encouraged cross–pollination between different groups’ sites through the courses’ major assignments. First, each group was required to make two in–class presentations during the quarter (each worth 10% of a student's overall grade). Groups were expected to discuss the various definitions of their keyword that they had included on their page; how their keyword's meaning had shifted between specific literary texts; how specific uses of the keyword invoked residual, emergent, and dominant meanings; what words, social contexts, and activities were commonly associated with the keyword (or opposed to it); what other keywords formed clusters of meaning with their word; and how they had used and were planning to use their page’s discussion area to generate critical questions. Lastly, the groups discussed their pages’ development—how they had created their pages, which members had done what to them, any major problems they had encountered and how they had resolved them, and where they anticipated their pages going during the remainder of the quarter. During the best of these in-class presentations, students taught one another how to construct an effective wiki-page, modeled how to talk about it publically, and set the table for the day's lecture/discussion. The most common way in which students’ projects went off track was when a group tried to construct a single, essential definition for its keyword on its wiki page. For example, a “science” group initially treated its word as if it was ahistorical, with a self-evident meaning. The group’s members simply looked for examples (primarily online) of things that most people might now term “science” and then arranged them into an anachronistic, linear narrative. Following a somewhat awkward presentation during the opening weeks of the quarter, members of the “science” group—to their great credit—turned their attention back to specific uses/meanings of their keyword. Ultimately, they produced one of the strongest pages in the class. Moreover, I designed the projects to encourage cross–pollination between various groups’ wiki pages, because they each required students to think through the ways in which their own keywords formed clusters with those being tracked by other students. The essays specifically required students to read and assess the work that other groups were doing on other pages and to situate their own work in relationship to it. For example, if a student was in the “sex” group, he or she might be required to think the relationship between this keyword and “race,” and then to reflect on the ways that the two word’s pages highlighted or failed to indicate adequately these connections—typically, in a common course text, such as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia or Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok. After completing such reflective assignments, students were typically encouraged to modify their group’s pages. The second of the two response paper assignments also required groups to swap “ownership” of one of their pages with another group, for one week, and then to reflect formally on connections between the work they had done on their original and “adopted” pages. The exercise not only encouraged writing across the sites but also helped spur weaker groups to action, as more motivated groups publicly outstripped their earlier efforts. |