As the semester continues I’m hoping that I can give students more choice in blog prompts or that we might collaboratively come up with some blog prompts together. This week I am hinting at that by having two possible prompts that students can choose between.

Transition from High School to College

Next week we start #fyschat where we will be annotating a Washington Post article with hypothe.is. The article is about why good high school students are not necessarily good college students. I thought that having students reflect on their own experience of transitioning from high school to college would be a cool way to tie things into #fyschat and that they may even want to share their posts during the Twitter chat on the 25th.

However, a few weeks ago I had given student’s a wildcard prompt and let them blog about anything that they wanted and many of them chose to blog about just that. So, that would be pretty boring for those students. Hence my reasoning for coming up with two options.

Paideia

Being a first-year seminar this class is only half my design. Being an honors section puts on, even more, requirements to do certain assignments and use certain assessments. I don’t mind it at all. I actually think it is pretty awesome that we have a group of educators that are thinking about what all students should experience. I get a lot of freedom to put my own “digital citizenship” spin on things and I like thinking about ways to integrate things.

One of the assignments that everyone has to do is a “paideia essay”. The prompt is collectively written by the working group and it calls on students to personally reflect on some big questions. The questions center around what it means to be a college student at a liberal arts institution, what does the student feel called to do in terms of vocation, how does a liberal arts education fit into that, what does it mean to be an educated person, etc. It is also very practical as it asks questions about what the student will study and how they will study.

Another thing I did with one of the blog prompts in weeks past is that I based it on the prompt for the midterm paper. I did this to give students a way to write informally in public about the same topic that they would write about formally for the midterm. This gave them an opportunity to practice writing about those ideas on a public forum where I knew they would get feedback from each other (I do ask them to comment on each other’s posts) but they had a chance at getting some feedback from people that might read their posts.

So, the second option of the prompt is the informal paideia. Same as the assignment but on their blogs and written for the public.

I’m hoping that by giving some choice students will be able to pick a prompt that works for them. I’m hoping to get more creative with the prompts as we go along.

Cheers,

Autumm

Image Credit: By Flicker.com user “a4gpa” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/a4gpa/195354385/) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

For this week’s blog prompt I’ve asked my DigCiz students to write about hyperlinks. We discussed it and brainstormed it in class a little bit. I’m always harping on them to use more hyperlinks in their posts. I’m not sure they understand why I put them through this.

A part of it is the simple digital literacy of creating a hyperlink. Different systems do it differently and there could be a whole post just on how they are technically created in various environments. I’ve come to appreciate how I can highlight text in WordPress, with a URL waiting on the clipboard, paste it over the text and rather than the text disappearing and being replaced by the URL a hyperlink is created. Other systems don’t make it so easy. Some force you to use a WYSIWYG editor and for some others if you don’t know how to code the HTML you are out of luck.

There is, of course, the point about citation to be made when talking about hyperlinks. It is important to understand your influences and to be transparent about where ideas (and materials) are coming from. In a formal citation we make a notation in the text following a certain rules of style which then reference a list at the end of the paper or the page that give more information about how we can find that resource. The hyperlink is doing something very similar but in a much more compact format.

However, a big reason why I want students to think and write about hyperlinks is because I want to draw out a conversation about layers and connection in knowledge. This is the bigger conversation that I want to have. I’m not sure that all students will get it but I want to challenge all of them to consider it. We just finished reading Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article As We May Think where Bush envisions a machine that could trace the connections of knowledge. We did an improv exercise in class where we said the first word that came to our minds based on the word the previous person said. We are starting to explore how the pursuit of knowledge is a connected endeavor more so than a transactional one.

Of course there is the old game of “Hey look at me. I’m the professor and I have all the knowledge. Now I will give the knowledge to you and then you will give it back to me so that I can make sure you got it.” That is a thing and I don’t want to belittle it because there are tons of instances where that might be the best way to learn a thing. However, when we stop seeing knowledge acquisition as only possible via a transaction and we start seeing it in terms of connection then powerful things start happening. 

So, I’m hoping that students will consider different dimensions concerning hyperlinks. That they will do some searching on the different purposes around hyperlinks that are of interest to them, write about that, and of course link to the things that they found interesting. These next three weeks we are talking about environments and we will get into other ways of layering knowledge and connecting.

Image Credit by Xavier Gigandet et. al. [CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons