thunderfish

 Bookstore/Libraries: Textbook options // SureStart cost and participation? Other institutions' platforms and textbooks? Connect interoperability Libraries partnership possibilities IRB for classroom projects? Relationship of oncampus to online versions of 1010

 Gee's definition of literacy as "mastery of a secondary Discourse." My reading of Gee: Essay-text literacy is dominant to the point that it seems "natural"/"superior" as a way of encountering texts, producing text, and "reporting" information. I both agree and recognize that this assumption then drives a shitload of how we teach "good" writing, what readings we select, how we talk about logic, why we are skeptical of multimedia, etc.... IF I believe that essay-text literacy predominates academic disciplines (do I really believe this? in terms of formal texts, yes, but I wonder what readings I might find that reveal how much disciplinary literacy rests instead/also on other types of texts and interactions that do not rely on essay-texts. Lab notebooks, for example.) ... then I think I still feel a pretty high obligation to teach and assess students' ability to produce essay-text performances, in the way of a research-based, thes...

Here's what Bill Hart-Davidson says about growth in writing skill: " In a nutshell, what helps students improve is a program of  deliberate practice   with an emphasis on the following four activities: Giving high quality (criterion referenced, specific, and actionable) feedback on others’ writing Planning Revision focused on higher order concerns (not merely grammar, spelling, etc) Criterion-referenced review (a.k.a. critical reading) Reflective writing about all of the above, referencing specific learning goals related to writing" (from the link above) Some comments/thoughts/claims of mine to put alongside his list: Real revision occurs when a student understands feedback, owns the feedback, and wants to make change. How can we help students pay attention to peer feedback (even if it's bad or they choose not to address it)? How do we make sure there is a moment when a student gets a grade/feedback during which they give it (purposeful?) attention? Good feedback sho...

Activity 1: Fact-check your drunk uncle // Limitations of AI Activity 1.1: AI summary comparisons: What biases do you detect? Activity 2: Explore recent scholarship in PTW Activity 3: Systems thinking // Project management Activity 4: Track changes // "Real" revision Activity 5: One good graphic // Information design  Activity 6: "Plain English" // Shrunken White Elephants //  Technical conventions // Editing Activity 7: Interviews // Synthesis // Presentations Activity 8: Case study // Ethics // Rhetoric // Tone The "challenging students" policy -> from text to flowchart The department bylaws --> from text to flowchart exploration/extention chat with ChatGPT, with very little ...? Chapter from We are Government about the guy who manages the national cemeteries -- as way to set up "technical" writing as systematic processes -- spreadsheets and such NCSU's big student report.

 Close reading of academic writing can be productively integrated into the class, I think. Especially for less-prepared students, hoping they notice details of citation isn't enough. (Pessimistically this semester, I'm not really sure that directly pointing it out is, either... :/ ) Reading reading reading. How do we get students to understand the reason for reading directly rather than only reading AI summaries? (**Can we do an exercise with an assignment guidelines doc to help them see the nuances that are excluded?) If I want students to use folders I have to think through them much more thoroughly on the front end.  Composing in the AI Age can/should include more instruction into tracking changes -- this is a new way to get at old rhetorical and metacognitive goals? Students need to not only produce effective text but be able to explain specific phrasing, omissions, edits, etc. 

 Some ideas from Amanda Sander's dissertation draft (2025): p 24: A third lens is Ivanič’s (1998) four aspects of a writer’s identity or selves that a researcher should consider: the autobiographical self, the discoursal self, the self as author and the possibilities for self-hood. The autobiographical self is the personal stories, experiences, and history that a writer tells themselves and will bring to their writing (Oliveira, 2016; Woo, 2023). The discoursal self focuses on how a reader sees the writer, “it is concerned with the writer’s ‘voice’ in the sense of the way they want to sound, rather than in the sense of the stance they are taking” (Ivanič, 1998, p. 25). Self as author focuses on the writer’s beliefs around a piece a writing, what the writer wants to express in their text, or how they position themselves in relation to the writing (Ivanič, 1998; Oliveira, 2016; Woo, 2023). Lastly, possibilities for self-hood focuses on the social aspects of writing and the po...