thunderfish

 Writing about key terms (suggested in the TFT chapter, as a way to build students' use and familiarity with those terms on their way to developing a theory of writing). Their terms: audience, genre, rhetorical situation, and reflection; exigence, critical analysis, discourse community, and knowledge; context, composing, and circulation. (ME: Would Beaufort's + Moje's terms suffice? Not quite?) Exploration of an article in field/major of interest  thesis/dissertation in field of interest Definition of "good" writing (with increasingly complexity over the course of the semester) -- could these serve as beginning-of-course diagnostic and end-of-course text for assessment? "warm-ups" (Build a repository with GTAs next year?) Something incongruous/out of place/mismatched (example: Grace Langeburg's Christ on the cross between 2 HD projection screens - for confirmation class; Kyle Burns' pennies suspended in midair in a rolling car) Literacy narrativ...

  FUNCTIONS/OUTCOMES   [ Questioning my rationale: My current willingness to consider allocating class time to pre- and post-course data gathering implies that I see a pretty high value in this effort. Is it justifiable? What, exactly , do I think I can accomplish through this kind of data collection? Is it fair to think that my own curiosity around this kind of data would transfer to students in ways that would build their engagement in the course? Is it fair to think that GTAs would be willing and able to guide students through results? Is it realistic to move the data from raw form to some presentable form that students could explore--and who takes on this task? What help do I need to build a really good, reusable survey --one that ideally makes the move from raw to presentable form quicker? What broader composition conversations should the questions be able to speak to (and what opportunities for GTA/instructor publication can I set in motion?) Is it justifiable? I...

 Intentional Writing, Attentive Reading, Purposeful Living (blunter title: the NOMO/STFU curriculum) THEME: Identity and Belonging in the 21st Century (blunter: You are special! And you are also not the only snowflake in the sky! // Your experience is part of a larger web of meaning) Threshold Concepts We are all writers (and readers) // We are enveloped by written language (and other multimedia compositions) Language use is diverse // Using language well involves knowing your options within contexts. Composing is a process // Composing processes are diverse. Composing is part of a social conversation // Writing allows humans to travel across time and space. Writing is an opportunity for exploration and learning. // Writing (class) is a laboratory for knowledge-making.  Language is rhetorical, not literal; meaning can be contested. Written composition is always material and increasingly digitally mediated. Writing products are only a part of writing as activity; writing is gre...

  A colleague asked me for information about how other programs are integrating AI into their FYW courses. I don't yet know of a really good synthesis, but here are some various frameworks I'm finding: From Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning (via RIT )  1.  "Talk directly and specifically with students about how your assignments are meant to work.  Our students are not, by and large, looking for opportunities to cheat or take shortcuts. The vast majority, in fact, are just as concerned to determine the ethical and responsible use of AI as are their instructors. The primary challenge posed by generative AI is not that, in making cheating easy it will, therefore, make it rampant, but rather that its utility will blur the lines for even our most scrupulous students between seeking help or brainstorming ideas, on the one hand, and soliciting an unacceptable degree of assistance, on the other.” 2.  “Disaggregate process from product, and render it v...

 A colleague of mine thinks that in our first-year writing program we should engage students in reading about  but not using  AI. I am trying to work out why I don't think this is an appropriate stance, and I'm struck on this analogy, which feels both apt and problematic: Imagine you're teaching a class in transportation. Your students are excited not only to learn about  various modes of transportation but also to learn how  to transport themselves around their campus, their communities, their world. Since personal vehicles are a common form of transportation, they assume some part of the course will include learning about driving and practicing  driving cars. When students get to class, their instructor tells them that because there are a number of ethical problems with driving--environmental and natural resource impacts, contributions to sprawling development, negative impacts to the nuclear family (since cars increase the distance people can travel from...

Coming from dinner tonight with a visiting guest speaker, Danny Snelson , who's in town for the UW Humanities Summit. Talk turned to Danny's work on Grand Theft Eco , a project that uses Grand Theft Auto to create videos imagining LA in 2050. When I first read about and viewed the project, my affective response was to feel daunted, intimidated by the extensive digital skills needed to create the project. This is often my response to new systems and platforms (even relatively intuitive and friendly ones), and I realize that part of the response comes from an aversion to failure. Back in the 1900s, when I was a computer science major for 2 years, I remember the frustration of failing to code something right, failing to trace out some syntax or logic error after hours of testing, hating that feeling of not getting it right.  Which makes me wonder whether there exists already some kind of composition guidebook, a kind of "practices in failing" book that includes activitie...

 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