Monday, January 25, 2016

Today's Rabbit Holes: Storify and Snagit

Learning about all the digital tools out there is certainly amusing, at times, and also frustrating. And did I mention time-consuming?

Today I managed to spend at least an hour making Snagit demos for my creative writing students and uploading them to YouTube. First, I decided that I needed to get rid of the Yahoo screen that I somehow added to all of my new tabs (clicked the wrong button? said yes to the wrong pop up?) because it wouldn't allow me to Snagit. That deleted Snagit from my Chrome bar, of course, so I had to reinstall it. Then the sound didn't work right. Blah blah blah -- you know how this story goes.

An hour later, I managed to do this: How to Create a Blogspot Blog.

Then I logged in to my TweetDeck and once again got lost in the shuffle. I just can't read backwards in time.  Q: is there any way to change that so that I can read posts from the earliest to the latest?

Someone somewhere along the way mentioned Storify so I decided to investigate that. I added the extension to my Chrome and diddled around for a while before making the (duh)scovery that I needed to create yet another account for myself with yet another password. (Add to the time-consuming element the need to remember all of these new accounts and passwords ... yesterday, to simplify my life, I logged into my long neglected Tumblr account in order to delete it. My last log in? 600+ days ago. Ugh.)

Another while later, this is the result: Here's my silly Storify thing. Not sure how this is going to work for me, if at all, but have discovered three friends using it, so perhaps I'll have to find their stuff one of these days.

Oh, and I also created a website for myself this weekend, which will prove to be another timesuck. But that's material for another day/hour.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Using a Blog in a Creative Writing Course

Dear fellow writers and teachers of writing,

I've got a senior level creative writing seminar that I regularly teach in the spring. Students can work in poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction, and the course is devoted to talking about writing/playing (exercises), reading, and workshop of more finished pieces. I've assigned one text (Stephen King's On Writing) and then some online readings in all three genres (randomly discovered in a moment of pre-course planning) but have left the second half of the semester open to their online discoveries.

I'd like them to find readings and assign them to the rest of us, and then I'd like them to write in a blog about their readings -- what can we, as writers, learn from these readings? What kinds of writing challenges or exercises can we generate from these readings? While I'm requiring them to share their writing exercises (also self generated) with the rest of us on Google Documents, I'm expecting their writing about writing to be more polished -- and thus posted in the public space.

Until yesterday, I was planning to use ONE blog with multiple authors (there are 13 students enrolled in the course at the moment), mostly for ease of reading, but after listening to Robin DeRosa talk about learning in the open, and allowing students ownership of their academic work, I'm rethinking that plan. Would it be more effective to get each student to create his or her own blog and then tweet each post to a class hashtag?

Until yesterday, I thought I'd have students share their reading assignments with us in the Google Doc syllabus, but now I'm thinking that we should create our own "anthology" in the open so that other creative writers can use it, and so we can keep adding to it as I teach the course each year. We can also add the writing exercises that students generate, and perhaps some examples of their responses. I'll have to learn more about how to assemble that sort of textbook, following Robin's example.

Any experience or advice would be appreciated -- the course starts a week from today!

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

How To Videos

Today I created a 2 minute instructional video to show students how to create and share a Google document.

The video in question

The process of making the video wasn't all that difficult. I used the TechSmith SnagIt tool, which adds itself in a second to Chrome and will work fabulously with my Asus Chromebook, and I easily posted it on my YouTube account. Then I shared it with my current J Term course (we spent at least 30 minutes of our first meeting going over things like Google Documents) on our LMS page and asked for their feedback. (Not sure I'll get any, though, unless I ask them about it in class; so far, they haven't responded to any of my LMS emails, though I know they read them since they do all the things I ask them to do in the emails. I'll have to ask them in class tomorrow what works best -- the in class hands-on tutorial or the instructional video, or both. Since all four of the students in the course are education majors, I'll trust their impressions.)

Listening to the video I created, though, was kind of a bummer. It made me self conscious, first of all. I don't like the sound of my voice. And then I couldn't remember everything I wanted to say without hesitating and repeating myself. Somehow, talking to my screen isn't as effective as talking to a live audience. Now I can hear all of my verbal tics (ugh), and students can't ask me to clarify anything so I don't know if what I'm doing is clear, concise, and effective. Perhaps, though, it's a good exercise to talk through whatever it is I'm doing, so that I can streamline what I say in class.

I can see making more of these videos to help students remember, after class, when they actually sit down and begin to do their first assignments, how to get up and running. I'll need one for creating and sharing a Google Document, one for creating a group contact list on gmail, and maybe one for using Google Documents to give feedback to each other's work.

I've also thought about teaching this writing workshop as a hybrid course in the future -- or completely online. Then more students could take it without having to drive in or having to find a place to live on campus for the J or summer term. Then I'd use introduction videos to introduce myself to the students and give them a more "human" feel.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Attentional Digital Disorder

I've had a Twitter account for years now, but rarely post on it because, as I joke, "It's hard to reduce myself to 140 characters." And I've used the Twitterverse and the blogosphere to share creative nonfiction (personal essays?) and reactions to random encounters, instead of utilizing them as pedagogical tools.

Now that I'm learning how Twitter works to exchange professional theories, ideas and information instantly, I'm also a little freaked out by what I perceive to be my inability (or a deficit in my ability?) to focus, to take in, all the bits coming at me. I've downloaded TweetDeck as a way to "organize" all of the incoming streams but find the side by side columns of tweets to be overwhelming. It's like visiting the mall on December 23 without any real idea of what I'm supposed to be finding -- just the sense that there's something in this mess that I need to get but all of these people jamming the hallways with their own intense desires to find what they need to get are preventing me from figuring out just what that is and where I might find it.

In other words, my impulse is to run screaming.  And I get, literally, dizzy. My eyes burn. My head hurts a little.

Even the #hashtags intimidate me. It's not the mall proper, of course, but it's Target, or Kohl's, or some other anchor store full of crazed consumers and burning-eyed suppliers.

Even Facebook, my go-to conglomeration of impressions, has become too much for me to mentally manage. The more I read, the more I'm fed. I'm getting the impulse to drop about 300 of my friends to make the menu more manageable. Or just to delete the page entirely.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions about how to focus my baby boomer brain while I'm in the Twitterverse so that I don't completely lose it and break down into a gibbering 140 character tagline mess?

Monday, January 4, 2016

Starting a new course, and taking a new course

This January term is an intellectually productive time for me -- I'm teaching a new version of my Creative Nonfiction Workshop with an added service learning component, and I'm taking an online digital pedagogy course as a student.

But intellectual production comes with a price.  I like to think of myself as a quick study, and as someone eager to learn. I also like to think that I'm "savvy," or relatively so, when it comes to using electronic media. But today that vision of myself crumbled.

I struggled for at least twenty minutes with a simple task: I wanted to upload two small photographs of my "space" for the J term on my first course post. Nothing seemed to work. When I used the "advanced editor" and tried to add the photographs using a URL from Google Drive, I got a broken link, even when I opened up the photo to viewing by anyone having access to the link (ie, no sign in required).  When I added the photographs as attachments, I first got a message telling me that I could only upload ONE file (though the link asks for "documents," plural), and then another telling me that my post was too big. When I finally settled on one picture to upload as an attachment, it came out massively huge, even though I tried to scale it down. What was I doing wrong?

It wouldn't have bothered me as much as it did if I hadn't been able to see the cute pictures (two of them) of workspace posted by my colleague Valerie -- complete with soulful doggies.  If Valerie was able to post two pictures, why couldn't I? Am I actually unconsciously incompetent at this?  Will I be "that woman" who can't get the thing to work right, no matter how hard she fiddles?

After editing the post for the 4th time, I decided to call it quits, my spirits doused. This is how my students must feel when, for whatever reason, something doesn't work right and they can't follow what seem to be simple directions.

In fact, this kind of snafu happened today during the first CNF Workshop meeting. One of the four students couldn't create a distribution list for our course members because, as her computer kept informing her, she'd "exceeded her quota." True, she had 8000+ emails hanging out in her inbox (and I thought my mom was terrible with her 2000+ stack of digital detritus), but even after we coached her to delete over 400 of them FOREVER she was still over the quota. She struggled with the errors in the public space for about 10 minutes before declaring that she'd just paste the email address list I'd sent to everyone into Google Documents every time she wanted to share.

Somehow, this seemed like surrender.