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| The Keywords Kiosk: Instructors Exchange |
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| 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.
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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 pages 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 others writing. (It wasnt
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 others 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
quarteras 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 keywordsdriven 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 crosspollination between different groups
sites through the courses major assignments. First, each group
was required to make two inclass 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 pages
discussion area to generate critical questions. Lastly, the groups
discussed their pages developmenthow 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 groups 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 groupto their great creditturned
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 crosspollination
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 words pages highlighted or failed to indicate adequately
these connectionstypically, 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 groups 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.
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