Teams are busy preparing their power points, handouts, and still working on their websites.  Last week M-F I spent at least 10 hours communicating with teams outside of class, and this weekend (Sat-Sun) I spent another 5 hours "tending" the locations where people are conducting their teamwork: Google Docs (3 teams) Email and Bb (2 teams). 

Learning this week:

• Team management communication.  Generally the teams that are using Google Docs are experiencing richer communication amongst each other and the instructional team.  This is because the activity is all seen "at a glance" and a person who posted a question/reply can email the team a notification in two clicks.  Not every team member is equally communicative, but it involves more people, even people who were not interacting as often via email "show up" on google docs
  
  
• EC support needed for Team management sites -- I could not give this during lecture and so I posted a message on our Google Docs.
  
  
• Reflections -- Some more reflection drafts are appearing on team websites.  People are still learning how to reflect deeply rather than just generalize and list everything.  It is not easy to consider experience as data that backs up an argument. And they are forgetting that I gave them a handout on reflection on March 31, so I have been referring people to it.
  
  
• Editing using track changes -- I see that some people are doing this, and some have not started.  The logistics needed some more clarification since not everyone was in class when I demonstrated how to do it and provided a handout.  One person was confused about the # of words to be edited and what to do if editing reduced a team member's content below the 2000 w minimum, so that needed to be elaborated. 
  
  
• Technology issues.  I was able to help teams with the following issues that came up
  
  
• Power point 2007 not transfering well to other computers or ppt 2003. How to translate a ppt to a pdf using Google Docs
  
• Subpage listings -- how to modify their headings and word wrap. 
  
• Pathway pages -- how to advertise subpage content and links to it when the team does not want subpages to appear in a navigation bar
  
• Breadcrumbs -- how to make them show up above titles so people can link back to higher levels of the site.
  
• Navigation -- one team had almost all their pages attached to the top of the site.  I helped give them tips on moving them into a hierarchical relationship using the Site Map feature and "move page"
  

Websites are really shaping up now.

This week Erin and Buffy visited our classes to provide feedback on the current drafts of the sites.  Among other things, we learned about 

• Clarifying and being proud of the student-authored nature of our sites, and the fact that they are based on a limited but valuable set of interviews and documents
  
• Introducing home pages in a way that would clarify Community Service Learning and link it to Volunteerism
• Introducing all pages in a way that orients readers to their purpose, audience and their context within the website 
  
• Making good use of our site titles and page titles within the opening sentences, and similarly explaining and using images
• Providing charts, lists, and visual metaphors and other ways of breaking down information into subcategories
• Focusing our April 14 presentations on what we learned "about" CSL from research (themes/sources overview), how we organized and visually designed our sites (only 2 mins!), what we learned "through" CSL methods in 463, and our recommendations for the future of CSL locally

Buffy and Erin provided "blurbs" about their organizations and themselves so that we are using approved information on our sites.

A week ago, Erin and Buffy and I met with Rosalie Pedersen at the Teaching and Learning Center to plan our event, which will take place April 14, 2010 from 12:30 to 1:50pm, during class time for our COMS 463s.

Purposes

We realized there were many purposes for the event because of the various stakeholders involved:

• 463 students are performing their presentations for a grade in COMS 463 and to showcase the work they did
• Administrators want to understand the CSL phenomenon since they don't experience it themselves
  
• Funders (including admin) need to understand the ways in which staff and money are needed to support CSL
  
• Community partners will be interested in finding out what kinds of projects they can be involved in
• Instructors are looking for profiles of their own and their colleagues' courses, and want to know how CSL can fit into a course they might be teaching.
• Interview participants want to see how they've been profiled, and are interested in how their input has become part of a larger mosaic 
  

Venue

• Our venue is a small lecture hall with tiered seating for 64 people.  It's in the Science B building, which is central on campus
  
• We needed a venue to fit our whole class of 31 people (including the instructional team) AND visitors
• We needed at least 30 seats for people we want to invite to the event.
• I was able to obtain this room for free because the presentation occurs during class time
• We also booked a reception room for 1.5 hours after the event, since another class starts in our presentation room at 2pm sharp
  

Invitations

• Erin created an invitation list with priority 1 (VIPs) and priority 2 guests.  Our priority 1 guests, mainly administrators and community partners, number 21 people. 
  
• We are asking our VIPs to reply by April 5 so that we can invite priority 2 people
• Priority 2 people include most of our instructors and interviewees. 
  
• Erin and I have been designing the invitation.  I created a vertical banner image that goes next to the text, and Erin drafted some text and I edited it, for an invitation to VIPs. 

Recording

• We decided to make an audio recording of the presentation, possibly with wireless lapel microphones. 
  
• We decided not to use Elluminate, a program that records the power point and voice and a little image all at once.  This would have required all presenters to stand stationary in front of the microphone and would reduce the drama of being able to move around while presenting.

About two weeks or so ago, I received news in my email that we'd be working with a different staff member from Volunteer Calgary. Buffy St-Amand would be taking on the project from here instead of Zoe Fleming. 

I and the students are a little disappointed because Zoe had the experience of introducing herself and of giving feedback on the proposals, and Buffy did not. 

However, we know that staffing often changes with community partners, and we are grateful to have Buffy working with us to ensure that the Community and Volunteerism perspective is acknowledged in our final work.   

A lot has happened since I last posted an update.  This post covers blog feedback, a team merger, the exam format, and individual website feedback. 

Blog updates --

• Individual blogs were given a quality grade and a recorded grade; the recorded grade was 10% higher to give mercy for the learning curve that people were dealing with at the time of handing them in. 
  
• A "Blog rhetoric hall of fame" was compiled with some excellent examples from student blogs.
  
• Individual blog feedback was made available to all members within a team, and shared among ECs, to enable learning from each other's feedback.

Team updates --

• About 1-2 weeks ago, team 2 and team 5 were amalgamated into Team 2.5 led by Kristen, with Michele as her EC assistant.  Carmen is helping the team stay on track.  They've done a lot just by creating a Google Document where everyone is writing their thoughts in different colors.
  
• ECs are busy helping their teams get their drafts ready for the March 29 draft deadline next week.  This means they are wrestling with issues about whose content goes on the site and how to organize it.

Exam --

• The course's exam was held last Wednesday in class.  Everyone was there, and everyone seemed to try hard.  Slightly more than half the class used the full 1hr 50 minute time given.
  
• 50% of the exam included matching & short answer on readings about Rhetoric, Service-learning, Editing, and Professional Writing. 
  
• 50% of the exam included 3 paragraphs that critiqued or praised rhetorical strategies found within a selection of 6 color screenshots of blogs/sites.
• Grades will come as soon as I'm done with individual websites.
  

Individual Websites --

• Currently I'm giving feedback on individual website assignments.  I am noticing that they are addressing audiences better than the blogs did. 
  
• The interview article content is generally better organized than the content that discussed or edited other people's documents, probably because people are more familiar with the genre of journalistic interview articles.
  

Today individual blogs were due, and we had a few interesting last-minute questions.  Students' task was to publish a piece of writing by former service-learning students, edit it as needed, and build a bridge between that item and the audience of their blog. 

We didn't expect that most students' questions would have to do with citation and reference conventions -- Do I need a reference list entry for the document I'm publishing and attaching?  How do I cite a quotation within a document I'm quoting?  If I paraphrase do I need a page number for each paraphrase?  Each of these questions often had a technological skill related to it, such as the skill of embedding a link to a document, putting a caption on an image, attaching a file at the bottom or top of a post, etc. 

But this was the tip of an iceberg... the majority of the challenge was lurking beneath the surface of their questions.  The questions were a symptom of a larger way in which students' rhetorical skills were being stretched.  Citing and referencing is just one of the many communicative acts that bridge the world of an original source to the world of the current reader.

Overall, the most important lesson seemed to be about one's rhetorical role as a mediator between the public and the world (and words) of a document they were publishing. 

I believe that most students have been so immersed in the subject matter of academic course work, or immersed in the details of their inherited document, that they can easily forget there is a real audience to address.  The audience seems distant, and what seems closer to their own world is that there's an assignment to write and a grade to obtain, and APA guidelines and other rules to follow along the way.  For students who studied their documents well and paraprhased, edited, and summarized it, the immersion in subject matter can be so engrossing that they lose their own voice or identity as writers of a blog post.  Sometimes they forget that the author is separate from themselves, and the boundaries between editor and author blur too much or disappear.

Bridging begins with the audience's side of the river.  The bridge's material is based on the service-learning theme and purpose of the project. The good rhetor will gradually show how certain questions, interests, needs or misunderstandings can be addressed by looking at a former service-learning project through the lens of a document from that project.   

Last week an old friend sent me a link to an online article about the challenge of preparing students for employment after degrees in the humanities.  In my reply, I wrote

" This term I am teaching my students to write content for websites and blogs using wordpress and google sites, and we are building toward one main site/blog that will express the benefits and challenges of community service learning from students' perspective.  My hope is that this will do more to support the humanities, and democracy, and quality education, than an internal PR website that glosses over the harder parts of higher ed -- mixing the intellect (academic rigor) with practical service (transferable skills). Only by building up students and alumni who can see the value of combining theory and practical service will the humanities be saved.  There is no life for the academic mind if you do not feed the body and soul by providing meaningful work to fellow citizens." 

Now that student teams have submitted their proposals, it is coming to light that not every team has made their team communication transparent to Carmen and I.  In some cases, teams are lucky that their communication was of high quality and did not lead to problems.  But when one team proposal was late and the team had insufficiently open communication records, I had no way of ensuring that everyone had input into the final version.  I needed to apply a late penalty fairly, and I did not feel it was proper to penalize only the editorial coordinator for what may have been a systemic problem of team communication and distributed responsibility.  Perhaps the lateness could have been avoided if Carmen and I had been included and had seen signs that the team did not have a backup system and appropriate internal deadlines in place. 

However, private team communication can lead to other problems besides late assignments.  Individuals and teams can go off track in conceptualizing assignment purposes and requirements, and more is at stake than their individual grades if this is the case.  Including us in their correspondence allows us a little window on things so that we can steer them away from problems in advance.

Normally in group projects students keep their labor behind a veil.  But normally -- in other courses -- students are working with library or internet research rather than with real human data and sensitive documents.  Normally students are not working on a project that involves the partnership and collaboration of community partners, and a level of public display of the process and product on a website.  Therefore, in a course like this, Carmen and I need to be included in ongoing team correspondence (other than teams' personal/social interaction beyond the topic of their project, and their private struggles, which we don't want to intrude upon). 

Including instructor and learning coach in team communication is one of the "counter-normative" and collaborative, socially accountable aspects of service-learning.  This is one way we see the transformed role of instructors discussed in our assigned reading by Clayton and Ash.

Our Community and Campus partners visited our class on Wednesday Feb. 3 to hear informal proposals about the purpose, content, and structure of the websites that teams hope to build this term.  We learned that it's important to distinguish student, teacher, and community audiences but also bring them together as a partnership that understands each other's needs and challenges.  Students have some wonderful ideas for informing audiences with glossaries and narratives, engaging audiences with images and facebook links, and bringing together our service-learning community with news updates and hopes of future networking, course development, and funding.

Today I released folders containing "inherited documents" -- what we are calling the documents written by former service-learning students. 

These are the files/projects that students are editing and profiling on our individual Wordpress blogs in order to build skills while learning about service-learning projects.  Eventually some or all of these will end up on the final team websites. 

Each team was given at least 3-4 projects to profile, and a set of supporting documents to help them understand the context of the file, and consent waivers will be uploaded within each folder so that students know who has consented to what.

Some students will need to edit/publish their works on a private blog post.  This is because we still do not have all the appropriate permissions and copyright waivers for each.  In some cases, where students have expressly donated their final reports to their partners, community partner permission is all that is needed.  In other cases we need to obtain more student consent if there are several co-authors of a file.