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| Introduction |
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| Overview |
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Narratives 
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| Exhibits |
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| Reflection |
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1. ONLINE WRITING CLASS
In Fall Term, 2001 I taught an online section of Composition 106, the second of two required courses in UM-Dearborn’s first-year writing sequence. This was the third time I’d taught such a course, and I sought to refine some of the techniques and strategies that had proven effective in past semesters.
In developing our online composition courses, our goal has been to create online equivalents of the best practices of our regular composition courses. In particular, we have worked hard to avoid a “correspondence course” model, in which students interact primarily with an absent teacher; rather, as in any other composition course, the students in the class become a discourse community, the members of which share certain assumptions and experiences that help them to understand how writing can be more effectively used to communicate with one another.
Aside from a possible introductory orientation session, all the work of the class takes place online, using an web-based environment called CourseTools, developed at the University of Michigan Media Union. This robust set of teaching and learning tools (generally the equivalent of Blackboard or the Virtual Learning Tool) gives instructors a solid foundation upon which to create environments and activities that support and enourage student learning.
In my Composition 106 course, students produced four distinct kinds of writing:
- Posts to a discusion board. These were to be informal, aimed primarily at sharing ideas and developing thoughts for possible papers. Students responded to questions I posted. These questions were often based on readings from a textbook. (I used a composition reader that focuses on issue of technology and literacy.)
- Weekly journal entries. These too were written in response to assignments which I posted. These were still informal writing, but students were encouraged to develop their thoughts at greater length (generally a page or two).
- Formal projects. There were four of these, each of which went through two drafts, one shared in peer review groups, the second submitted to me for comment. As in most writing courses, these assignments set students to a variety of writing tasks, increasing in length and complexity.
- Course portfoiio. At the end of the term, students selected from among their journal entries and formal projects those which they would revise and submit in a course portfolio that demonstrated what they had learned over the course of the term. This portfolio included a reflective statement in which students were asked to discuss their learning in the course.
2. HYBRID WRITING CLASS
In Fall Term, 2001, I taught another section of Composition 106, one which was assigned to a regular classroom. (Happily, the current “regular classroom” for most composition classes is a classroom equipped with computers for every student.) This class was designed as a “hybrid online class” -- we met in the regular classroom on Mondays and Wednesdays; Friday’s class was conducted online (using CourseTools, described above.) Students were free to come to the classroom at our regularly scheduled Friday classtime and use the computers there to complete their assignment. I generally used discussion questions that were similar to those given students in the online class. (Both sections used the same textbook and wrote similar assignments.)
3. ONLINE ASSIGNMENTS IN TRADITIONAL CLASSES
In several classes over the past year (including a graduate course on “Investigating Academic Literacy,” a first-year honors composition course, and a course in technical writing), I have made discrete assignments using online resources, either e-mail or CourseTools. In one instance, I asked students to respond to a question over e-mail. In another, an attempt was made to link students in several different connected courses through an online discussion board. In the third course, students were required to suggest possible topics for a group project on CourseTools, then respond to the suggestions of other students; students who argued most persuasively for their preferred topic convinced other students to work with them.
4. USING THE COMPUTER CLASSROOM
I have always felt that the major advantage of teaching writing in a computer classroom was that it brought writing into the writing classroom. (Imagine if we taught swimming in a room with desks and a chalkboard, then sent students home to their individual swimming pools to see what they had learned from our lecture!) In a Composition 270 course meeting in Fall 2002, I supplemented this essential component with lessons that were designed to help students make rhetorical decisions while using various applications, including e-mail, word processing (more advanced formatting features), presentation software, and a spreadsheet/graphics program. They were encouraged to apply the rhetorical principles underlying the class not just to traditional writing assignments but also to documents produced in a technologically rich environment.