Luis Figueroa on Blogging and Google Docs

From 1.0 to 2.0: My CTL Fellows Project

Luis Figueroa–Martínez

History Department

ORIGINAL GOAL

As I indicated in my CTL proposal in June 2012, I wanted to focus my project on the implementation of two technologies that have a great potential to more effectively develop a responsible and active community of learners inside and outside the classroom: (a) a collaborative course blog that would function as a learning journal, and (b) the use of Google Docs for both informal (short, impromtu) and formal (papers) writing exercises, both inside and outside the classroom.

KEY CHALLENGES

As also reported by many colleagues, in recent years I have increasingly confronted steeper challenges in getting a significant number of students to be more fully engaged with the course material, especially required readings and other sources such as films. Like others, I have been looking for new ways to make students more consistently responsible for thoughtfully studying all required sources, submitting better reading responses, come better prepared for class discussions, and be able to produce papers strictly following specific guidelines and deadlines.

To be sure, these are challenges we have all confronted, but as we learned during CTL’s year-long programs on the “Millennials” generation in 2010–2011, the nature of these challenges is intensified by how Millennials are “wired” at a cognitive and social level.

One factor in this is the intersection between accountability and audience, i.e., the fact that the work produced by students is usually seen and judged only by the instructor. Meanwhile, whereas our goal is always to give students the sense that the members of a class constitute a community of learners, traditional teaching and learning approaches are not always conducive to achieving this goal. Too often many students remain at the level of atomized individuals with widely varying degrees of commitment to their academic work and to the learning process they share with others. Millennial metacognitive skill deficits add another layer to these challenges.

FALLACY OF “DIGITAL NATIVES”

Paradoxically, while a great deal of the research literature likes to label Millennials as “digital natives,” my experiences and that of other faculty and computer center staff is that this is far from being such an across-the-board feature of the current generation.

Being familiar with Facebook and Twitter, for example, does not expose students to the experience of being web content creators beyond the posting of photos, web links or life updates.

On the other hand, it could be argued, going beyond standard Facebook and Twitter, or general web use, in our classes, or at least in some specific assignments, would expose students to many other ways of being “content creators” and public commentators interacting with a wider public interested in the scholarly study of numerous academic subjects that involve people who are often unlike them.

Familiarizing students with the unfamiliar is at the core of the learning process, from both a scholarly and a social perspective.

PAST EXPERIENCES

Back in the so-called “web 1.0” era of the late 1990s, shortly after arriving at Trinity in 1996 I incorporated the creation of both course-centered and student-centered websites in all my courses. Using off-the-shelf web editing software installed in our computer labs, I taught students how to create simple web pages where they posted their course work, incorporating the use of images, hyper-links to other websites outside the class, as well as hyper-textually linking their own work with that of other students in the class. These were very successful and rewarding experiences, especially after the first, “version 1.0” iteration of the approach in 1997. As we will readily agree, back then the web was still so new that virtually all of my students were excited about the opportunity to create websites that they could also use to talk about their lives and interests, something I allowed them to do, too.

However, once Trinity implemented the use of Blackboard around 2000 or so, I abandoned the use of public course and student websites, moving everything into the private realm of a course management system. But since weblogs, as they were initially called, emerged as one of the new “web 2.0” technologies around 2004, in the Fall of 2005 I experimented with blogging in a First-Year Seminar. Unfortunately, that first blogging experiment had to be abandoned midway through the semester because the blogging platform Trinity used at the time turned out to be far too cumbersome to use by both the instructor and the students.

NEW SOURCES OF INSPIRATION

Skipping forward to 2011–2012, I had four inspirations that helped me to decide that the time might be right to return to the idea of blogging in at least some of my courses.

First of all, Trinity adopted the far more powerful and yet easy-to-use WordPress blogging platform. Second, I noticed the ways in which another 2012–2013 CTL Fellow, Jack Dougherty (Educational Studies), was successfully incorporating blogging into his courses, I decided

The third reason for my interest stemmed from my experience designing, creating and running a new, WordPress-based website and blog for the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), which allowed me to gain a very deep understanding of this platform.

A fourth source of inspiration was learning at an ITEC workshop in May of 2012 about a cutting-edge initiative led by Bryn Mawr College centered on the notion of “Blended Learning” as a way to expand teaching and learning beyond the classroom.^[1] As Bryn Mawr explains it, the goals of their initiative, which is focused on teaching and learning in liberal arts colleges, are:

“to see if targeted use of this technology, blended with the traditional intimate classroom setting, will free up time for more in-depth coverage of complex material and create a more engaged learning environment” and to “enhance student engagement as a means of improving course completion, persistence in  science and math majors, and college completion.”^[2]

With these new sources of inspiration and others, such as those reported by The Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin’s “Blogging Pedagogy” blog, I decided that it was time to attempt my own “beta” or perhaps “version 1.0” of blogging in the classroom.^[3]

BLOG VISION: A COLLABORATIVE TEACHING-AND-LEARNING JOURNAL

An increasing number of faculty are experimenting with having students keep individual blogs. However, I wanted to center my experiment on a single course blog. In my view, a single course blog potentially has several advantages for generating a sense among students that the class is a collaborative learning community. My goal was, and remains, that students see the class blog not simply as a Moodle replacement, for example, but more as a sort of academic journal.

As contributing blog editors, students would submit various types of blog articles, such as their responses to assigned sources (readings, films and music), audiovisual materials related to the themes of the course; reflections on their learning-process experiences (meta-cognition); and the final versions of their individual papers and collaborative projects. In addition, depending on the exercise, students would post public comments on the blog articles written by other students and would include hyperlinks establishing connections between their own writing and that of other students.

As research shows, writing online represents a different kind of learning and communicative experience, in part because blog writing encourages the use of a multiplicity of modes of expression, both in rhetorical or discursive terms, and also because blogs allow readers to post comments on articles and engage in public dialogue with blog authors. In the case of “collective” blogs that function as journals, contributors share a responsibility for the blog and its engagement with its visitors.  This has the potential of helping students move away from the atomization of individual concerns that can isolate members of the Millennial generation.

Precisely because the blog is a public website, most work would be available to the world at large, from faculty and students examining related themes in other Latin American, Caribbean, and American Studies courses, at Trinity and elsewhere, to a far broader public in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and beyond. Indeed, my goal was (and remains) to encourage students to connect with the interested public beyond the classroom. Unlike during the web 1.0 era of the 1990s, when my students (and the course’s) website did not include any mechanism (other than a email link) for visitors to provide feedback on what the students and the instructor posted, in today’s era of web 2.0 social networking technologies, systems like WordPress allow website visitors to easily post comments on blog articles.

As is documented in the research literature, and as I experienced first hand when using far more limited, so-called web 1.0 websites in the late 1990s, the “public readership” or “public accountability” element is an approach that helps transform how students relate to their duties and the learning experience. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of this element.

In developing my initial CTL–supported experiment in the Fall of 2012 I became overly ambitious in how I conceptualized the goal of promoting a greater readership for the blog and engaging students online beyond the blog on more directly social-network platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Moving forward to the version 2.0 of the experiment I will conduct in the Fall of 2013, I’m streamlining the ways in which the course will have an online presence and how students and I as their instructor will interact online. Below I provide further additional reflections on my upcoming version 2.0

GOOGLE DOCS: INFORMAL & FORMAL WRITING

A second, initially less central or extensive component of my initial CTL–supported experiment in 2012 involved the use of Google Docs for the composition of both informal and formal writing work by students inside and outside the classroom.

Google Docs has many advantages as an online word-processing platform. First, because papers and other writing work is based on Google’s servers, there is be virtually no chance that students can lose their work and fail to submit it on time. Second, and more importantly, because Google Docs greatly facilitates the sharing of documents, faculty are able to check student progress in writing papers by using timetables for their completion, and to post comments online on their drafts on the “margins” of each document page, allowing us to give them feedback along the way and not only on their final product. Moreover, sharing documents “in the cloud” has the potential to make it easier to engage drafts in peer-review exercises since students can post comments on the documents without interfering with the main text and can do it at any moment during the writing process. Sharing these documents online also makes the collaborative writing of papers and blog articles more viable.

DESIGNING VERSION 2.0 – Fall 2013

I will experiment further with blogging in a new History and International Studies seminar I’m teaching in the Fall of 2013, titled “Sports, Race and Nationalism.” Below I discuss briefly some of the new approaches I will include in the second iteration of this CTL–supported experiment.

First, unlike the 1.0 experiment in the Fall of 2012, the Fall 2013 sports seminar’s blog was up and running well before the course started; in fact, it was publicly available in early April 2013 ahead of the Fall Advising and Registration period. Indeed, the sports seminar’s course description, as it appears in the schedule of courses, includes the blog’s URL (http://sportshistory.trincoll.edu).

Making the Fall 2013 course blog available this early not only allowed me to post more details online about the course and its specific requirements before the Fall 2013 Registration period, but also to post a couple of articles on the themes of the class, including a bibliography with a sample of readings among those that I’m considering for the final syllabus.

I decided to make the Fall 2013 blog available this early for two additional reasons: (a) because I wanted to make visually obvious to prospective and registered students that blogging would be an important, indeed essential, component of the course, and also (b) to begin modeling for students the experience of blogging, which I will continue doing during the summer (posting, for example, the final syllabus, notes about assignments and readings, and articles related to several course themes). Reflecting on my version 1.0 Fall 2012 experience, I’m hopeful that instructor blogging ahead and during the course will produce a far better response by students to the requirement that they blog, too.

Furthermore, my plan is also to produce a series of short instructional videos that will help students learn to use the most essential technical aspects of WordPress at Trinity, and not depend only on what I could cover during a tutorial workshop scheduled for early September. This way students can refer back to the short tutorial videos at any point during the semester.

One original idea that I was not able to pursue in the Fall 2012 version 1.0 blogging experiment was to promote the existence of the blog within the Trinity community and beyond. I scratched this goal when I perceived a great deal of resistance by students to the idea that their work would be available online to the wider public, as well as due to privacy issues that I did not consider as extensively as I should have in 2012 because I had not faced them during my successful experiences with simple websites in the late 1990s. In fact, following an idea that emerged during one of the CTL Fellows monthly meetings, one change I plan to implement in the Fall 2013 sports seminar is to give students the option of signing their blog articles and comments with a pseudonym, but keeping open the option of later switching to their real names if they were to become more comfortable with the idea of publishing online with their real names.

There are other changes I plan to implement as part of “version 2.0” that deal more specifically with the nature of some of the blogging assignments. A lesson I learned in the Fall 2012 version 1.0 experiment was that my original scheduling and distribution of blogging tasks was far too complex and confusing. Specifically, in an attempt to lessen the amount of blog writing that each student would have to do on a weekly basis, I staggered the assignments on a bi-weekly basis in ways that were far too ambitious, which I believe contributed to the resistance to blog and follow correctly and consistently the blogging instructions.

Meanwhile, in terms of using Google Docs as part of the teaching-and-learning environment in the Fall 2012 initial experiment, the most rewarding experience was using it during class time to do informal writing and discussion exercises. The experience was more uneven with the use of Google Docs for writing papers, but my sense is that this was due to factors not related to the technology itself. Going forward, my aim is actually to incorporate to varying extent the use of Google Docs in all classes beginning in the Fall of 2013, including my staple Caribbean History 200-level course, and the Historiography seminar that is one of the core requirements  for the History major. In fact, inspired by both my experiences in the Fall of 2012, as well as presentations and discussions among CTL Fellows during the 2012–2013 academic year, I am now developing new models for writing exercises that would be centered on the use of Google Docs for shared commenting on some required readings, the writing of papers, reflections on the experience of writing them, as well as possibly some peer-review exercises.

FINAL REFLECTIONS

Without doubt I definitely enjoyed the unique and privileged opportunity to be one of the inaugural CTL Fellows in 2012–2013. I learned a great deal about numerous aspects of our pedagogy across a very diverse set of disciplines, from the natural sciences and engineering, to the social sciences and the humanities.

Indeed, as I expressed to my CTL colleagues, I really wish that Trinity would provide more opportunities for faculty to more directly engage with and learn from the multiple approaches to teaching developed by members of our own departments and across all academic divisions, and from both senior as well as junior faculty.

I firmly believe that the best way to approach these exchanges is not necessarily through one-off events such as public lectures and discussion panels, but rather through recurrent meetings throughout the academic year by faculty organized in small interdisciplinary groups, like the CTL Fellow program itself, but adding the requirement that participants share their syllabi, assignment instructions, reflections on their experiences, and also visit each other classes periodically. It is my understanding at the moment that at least the latter component will be added to the 2013–2014 CTL Fellows Program.

Lastly, many thanks to CTL’s Co-Directors, Dina Anselmi and Christopher Hager, as well as my 2012–2013 CTL Fellows colleagues for such a nourishing experience throughout the year.