Teaching Keywords 2008
Planning on using Keywords for American Cultural Studies–the book or the website–in a course? Thinking about organizing a course or working group around a keyword project? Have some advice to share? Post it in this forum.
Planning on using Keywords for American Cultural Studies–the book or the website–in a course? Thinking about organizing a course or working group around a keyword project? Have some advice to share? Post it in this forum.
October 30th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
I’m interested in how instructors have framed the purposes and processes of such collaborative writing projects for their students. How have others thought about this, incorporated it into learning objectives and evaluations, and otherwise framed it to their students? What kinds of responses have they received from students? Discussion and examples would be most welcome!
December 16th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
I’m looking at Glenn’s assignment and wondering about the link between the dictionary revision and the write-a-keyword-essay elements. What’s the link between the two? Can/should one lead into the other? I’m also curious about how these two assignments link to the blackboard activities related to tracking usages in class.
December 20th, 2007 at 11:54 am
In response to Bruce: I haven’t fully worked this out yet–soon!–but the idea is that some elements of the dictionary revision could make their way into the students’ keyword essay. First of all, the examples of usage obviously form part of the archive for the essay (and in that sense duplicate the tracking of usage they’ll be doing on Blackboard, though it would be more selective). The key (if you’ll excuse that word choice) is that I want to be much more explicit with the students about what a keyword essay is. At some point before the middle of the semester–when they will turn their focus from the dictionary revision to the essay–I might well assign them to read the introduction (if i haven’t had them read it already), and/or spend at least part of a class looking at a couple of keyword essays in terms of their formal construction. If one of those essays starts from an OED definition, we could talk about how its author used the OED definition and built off it, giving them one model they could use to develop their own (either off the OED definition or, more interestingly though a bit oddly, off the definition their group constructed on the wiki).
Beyond that, I’d like to hear others’ suggestions, as I won’t be finalizing the syllabus till the second week of January, most likely.
December 20th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
By the way, the assignment Bruce refers to is going up–it’s still in development–on the Keywords wiki. Go to http://keywords.nyupress.org/wiki , and look for my name and course title–Major Developments in American Culture–in the left column.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I am very excited about stealing Glenn’s assignment, so I look forward to his completing it! I teach American literature, and we are in the process of revising our outdated survey-format courses (sophomore level), creating instead a “case study” model. In this format, each instructor will select 3 or 4 nodes in time to study in depth, using literary texts that speak to each other as well as cultural contexts. I am hoping that the Keyword assignment will offer some unity to my selection of four separate moments in time and help the students see an arc to and development in the literary history even though we will be leaving out huge swatches of it.
About selling the collaborative assignment to students: I just came back from interviewing some job candidates at the MLA convention, and a couple of them are already doing similar collaborative work (not in American Studies) using a web site called “Google.docs.” They told me that they simply stress the collaborative nature of all real-world work, and students are willing invest in it. For me, the problem was always how to grade the collaborative work, knowing that not all students worked equally hard, and I think this aspect bothered the students, too. This Keywords project allows tracking of who does what for most aspects of the collaborative project, and I’m expecting that this will solve the problems I have had before. I’m eager to begin!
Patti
January 6th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Steal away, Patti! Though I’m still fine-tuning both the dictionary assignment and the keywords essay. Classes start in just 8 days, so…….
It sounds to me as if using keywords could well offer the kind of unity you’re looking for across those different “nodes.” Note that Steve Tobias at the U of Washington is using the book and the collaboratory in his American literature survey, too. They’re on the quarter system and thus start later, so I see his wiki’s “landing page” isn’t up yet, but it should be soon.
And yes, we played a bit on google.docs as we were developing the wiki; its structure is somewhat similar. And I, too, have used the “real-world work is collaborative” line to justify or sell collaborative assignments, but with mixed results, to be honest. Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, business-oriented students are fine with the idea (though not always good at it). I think some humanities students, especially English majors, have chosen their majors in part to get away from things they associate with te business world. One thing I hope the collaboratory experience can do is offer models of collaboration for students (and others) that they don’t associate with business/corporate practices.
Looking forward to hearing more about how things go!
Glenn
January 10th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Hi all — After talking with several folks and working with a couple of classes, I’ve become interested in how teachers are going to talk with students about assessment. In other words, how does the assessment of an assignment with a public/web face differ from one that has only a faculty member and/or classroom as its audience, if at all? Can an assignment be a web success and a classroom failure or vice versa?
-bruce
January 12th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Good question, Bruce, which I’ll have to think about before I present this stuff to my students for the first time this coming week. I’ve generally found it a challenge to explain to students how I’m evaluating collaborative work, on line or off, and have taken to the practice of having part of the grade be shared by all members of the group, part individualized. And I explain that the group grade is mostly based on the product (in this case, how the collaboratively written keyword essay turns out in the end) and the individual grade is mostly based on he process (how much and how well each individual contributes to the essay). I think the public aspect of the collaboratories, while valuable, adds to the complexity of this…in ways I haven’t fully thought through yet. I hope others can contribute to this discussion.
P.S. There are several Keywords Collaboratories up and running now–check them out at http://keywords.nyupress.org/wiki
January 16th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Hi Glenn et al,
I’m planning ot use Glenn’s approach–that is, assigining groups of students (I’m going to call the groups “pods”) to a single word, which the group will track throughout the term. How many students seems about right size for each pod? I want a pod large enough so that the students feel part of a collaborative working group, but small enough so that they don’t step all over each other trying to edit the final essay. 3 or 4? I’d love to hear others’ ideas on this.
Thanks,
Patti
January 20th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Hi Patti et al —
I too find that the size of a group can be tricky. Larger means a bigger archive of materials, but also more potential difficulties in synthesis and editing. If you go big, one strategy might be to allow the students to work at the end of the quarter in the whole “pod,” to break into “sub-pods,” or to write individually (in “solo-pods?”), especially if you’re going to grade the final products (which always ups the ante on the tension within groups, in my experience). The alternative, I find, is to spend a lot of time in class on collaborative practice.
-bruce
January 27th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Hi,
Sorry to be slow to reply. My groups are all 3 or 4. My sense is that that’s large enough to produce a sufficient archive of materials, but small enough that arranging in-person meetings when necessary isn’t impossible, and just about the right size for collaborative writing. But we’ll see how that works this semester.
Glenn
January 27th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Practical question for people using the wiki: how did the sign-up sheet work? I went with another approach, having each student e-mail me individually with his or her username right after creating an account. That worked like a charm for 30 of the students (and meant I didn’t have to spend one long stretch of time adding names, one by one). But 4 or 5 others just didn’t do it. Did those of you who did sign-up sheets have a better ratio than that (in which case I’ll switch to that approach next time), or did you have some students who came to class without their usernames?
Glenn
January 28th, 2008 at 7:01 am
An alternative to either emailing or circulating a sign-in sheet to get student user names would be to use the discussion tab on your entry page. Each student, once they register with the wiki, can post comments on the discussion tab. You could use this tab the first day/week of class to have students enter their user names, email address, etc. Then, once they have their info on the discussion tab, you could then grant them special user privileges to start editing pages within your collaboratory. That way it’s all centrally located, and you won’t have to have an in-between step — or 40 emails from students.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:26 am
ps - to follow up on an earlier thread, it seems to me that pitching an online teaching tool such as a wiki is (in part) knowing the sort of skills students are going to take away from the class. Students who work with a wiki will understand how knowledge is produced within public domains — which is a meta-lesson they’ll hopefully take into research for other courses/projects. Connected to this, using a wiki in the classroom teaches students how to be smarter about the technology they already use … just like I walk students through how to be smarter about google searches by restricting their results (site=.edu or .gov), etc.
March 1st, 2008 at 1:05 pm
This blog has been quiet for a while. Let me share one thing I’ve realized at this point, midway in the semester. That is that I was too shy about using the wiki, or rather, I overestimated my students’ shyness about it. In the assignment I’m doing in my introductory American Studies class, I had them do the first part of their projects–tracking their keywords through their readings–on Blackboard. My assumption was that they were comfortable on Blackboard, and they’d gradually move to the collaboratories later, for the second stage of their projects. This has turned out to be more of a hassle for them than anything else, because now they have to move back and forth between the two. Next time I’ll have them do it all in the collaboratories, using the “discussion” tab as the place to “track” their keywords.
The other error I’ve made this semester is having a keyword group on a term that doesn’t come up more than very sporadically in the first half of the semester. Since, as Henry Yu points out in the first sentence of his entry, “ethnicity” doesn’t emerge as a significant keyword in American culture till the middle of the 20th century, it’s been rather frustrating for the “ethnicity” working group to sit, as we work our way from the 1770s up to the present, waiting for their time to come. This may be an argument for assigning groups pairs or clusters of terms, to make sure they’ve got something to track all semester.
How are other folks teaching the book and/or using the wiki faring?
July 25th, 2008 at 8:14 am
Glenn,
I love the collaboratories project, and I think that, as you’ve shown, Web 2.0 technologies open up all sorts of new pedagogical possibilities.
Have you experimented with blogs at all? You could still have students put their final keyword essay projects on the wiki, but during the semester you could have them track their keywords through individual or group blogs. Given the prevailing conception of blogs as “online personal diaries” (an arguable definition), one could think about those student blogs as “keyword diaries.”
Using public blogs on a site like wordpress.com would enable students to track their keywords not just through course readings, but also through current events and popular culture. Imagine, for instance, that a student tracking the keyword “gender” through the course was able to mash up assigned readings for the course with YouTube videos, photographs from the Library of Congress (http://www.flickr.com/photos/Library_of_Congress), and stories from the New York Times. Each week, students could be required to find one resonance of their keywords in the assigned readings, and one resonance of the keyword in contemporary pop culture. The multi-media projects that might come out of that kind of assignment could be really creative and fascinating, and they might get the visual learners in the class engaged with the project.
Using blogs would allow you to do another important thing, which is to have students use tagging and category labels as ways to track course themes/keywords throughout the course readings (and beyond). For an example of what I mean, check out two blog posts by my friend Jim Groom, who is an instructional technologist at UMW:
“If Category Clouds Could Talk” — http://bavatuesdays.com/if-category-clouds-could-talk/
“Knowledge, Categories, Tags, and Crime” — http://bavatuesdays.com/knowledge-categories-tags-and-crime/
Here’s what I want to highlight from the second post:
It’s really that proliferation and cross-pollinating of tags/keywords/categories that I think might be added to the “collaboratories” assignment. Why have the “ethnicities” kids sitting around doing nothing when they could be joining in the collective tagging process? And, yes, I’m talking about “folksonomies” here!
All in all, I think that this text really lends itself to these kinds of projects. I wish you lots of luck with it!
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Thanks to the article, Now there is more reason to comment than ever before! Everyone should participate. I am incorporating what your wrote to our project!