Innovative Uses for a Computer Classroom?

flard asks: "I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection. I am thinking about using a weblog for them to post their work and critique each other. Do you guys have any other cool ideas on what to do and what NOT to do?" How can the computers best be applied to assist in teaching a non-technical class? Use of a weblog is a start, but are there other pieces of software that can be deployed in such a setting?

Well...

[craenor]

Strange as it may sound you could have them each log into IRC, set yourself as the Moderator for the channel. Then take turns working on sentence structure, spelling and grammar.

*shrug*

groups

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use a Yahoo group and subscribe them all.
You could disallow non-students and maintain a very private discussion.

I had a computer lab English class once...

[TWX]

...and it degenerated into the teacher saying "stop touching the keyboard" every five minutes. No matter what concept for curriculum one comes up with, as long as the students can get onto the Internet, they will. I even was more creative than most, since I SSHed to the university solaris server, which was an arguably legitimate use, only to then launch a black and white console IRC session. I didn't get caught, but several other students with IM clients or GUI-based IRC clients did. Nothing punitive came of it though, because there were no real enforcement policies.

The class could have been much more efficiently run without computers, or at least without a live Internet connection. Some (like my case) will always find a way though the campus network, but if it can be minimized, that's the only way it will work.

Try a wiki

[ca1v1n]

Google for wiki. It's a website that anyone can change, keeping a changelog of course. You could have a lot of fun with one (or a few) of those, especially if any type of creative writing is to be going on.

Use Slashcode

[mikeophile]

Post an essay topic, let the kids review the submissions with mod points given to your favorite students. Just like Slashdot.

Writing

[Minam]

My wife taught an English writing course for several years (to non-native speakers) and used some Perl scripts I wrote for her to do things like forums (where the students were required to participate in online discussions about topics of interest to them) and a "random topic generator" (where a topic like what would appear on the TOEFL would pop up, and they had 30 minutes to write an essay on it). My wife also did the old-fashioned thing and had the students turn in papers, but she would type them up and post them online so that the students could see how each other did. She must have done something right, 'cause the students always loved her class.

I suppose what I'm recommending are forums. Never really used weblogs, so I can't comment on that.

Finding sources of cliche's

[jemenake]

As time goes on, I keep discovering that more and more commonly-used cliche's trace back to famous pieces of literature. (ie, "Neither a borrower, nor a lender be", "Good fences make good neighbors", "Out, out.. damned spot!", etc.). It surprises me how ignorant most people (including me) are about where these came from.

Now, looking back on my English experiences, I think it would have been pretty cool if each student were given a phrase and they had to use the net to find out what literature it originally came from and have to read enough of the surrounding text to be able to describe the context of the scene where the phrase occured (like Lady MacBeth trying to wash the blood off, etc).

MUSHes

[Boatman]

Have them explore a multi-user text-based reality simulator, like Elendor [elendor.net]. My little brother learned his excellent writing skills on Elendor, as a byproduct of interacting textually with extremely literate and picturesque writers.

He has been playing for about 7 years now. I asked him about the character he plays... and he could have gone on for hours. Read some of the "Role Play Logs". Amazing. And amazing that they're ephemeral - imagine if every action were logged! We could spend years just as spectators, watching wars and communities from hundreds of different perspectives.

don't tolerate a single bit of aolspeak

[colmore]

In that context, they're going to be using a lot of AIM slang, announce on the first day that it's an English class, and you expect English spelling and English grammar. In general I don't like computer classrooms, especially not for English. They get in the way of actual discussion. The best environment for a literature class is a big table where everyone looks everyone else in the face. Don't just ask your students to memorize the plot, ask them to think critically about the books. Why is this an important thing to read? What does it say about society? Literature is more than a fancy way of telling stories, don't let them discuss books on the level that they'd discuss an action movie, they're definitely capable of deeper analysis than "it was cool when..." Also, for high school English, don't underestimate short stories. You should definitely be assigning a lot of novels as well, but frequently young students are much better at thinking about short works critically. On the first day, have them read Hemingway's "A Clean Well Lighted Place" to get the ball rolling. You can read it in 10 minutes and the story obviously exists for a reason other than to tell about some event that happened to some characters. Also, I'd suggest The Bell Jar, Lord of the Flies, Huck Finn, and Catcher in the Rye as great books for ninth graders. If you're going to do any Shakespeare, Othello is probably the most accessible of the 4 tragedies. As far as the computers, I wouldn't use them for anything beyond in-class typewriters. Certainly don't make them do powerpoint presentations or webpages. What on earth does that have to do with English. Some sort of continuing reading response diary is a good idea, but make sure out-loud discussion and debate outweighs typing. Oh and they should be writing an essay a week, at least. It's a shame how poor the writing of most high schoolers is. Anyway, good luck.

Re:Answer: don't

[datawar]

Used properly, computers can be a very valuable resource in any classroom. They're not a specialized tool, like a calculator, that can only be used in certain, well-defined fashion - they're generic tools.

Most everyone in a given college classroom has at least passing familiarity with web-browsing and basic messaging systems (whether IM or forums), and so, unlike other posters have suggested, there should not be much of a learning curve.

From weblogs, to real-time commenting on what's going on in class, to anonymous questions (useful if someone in the class is shy about asking, for example, a question about grammar), to a million other possibilities, computers should definitely be used by a resourceful teacher.

A creative use of the computers in the classroom will definitely be better than a bunch of bored students wishing they could just suft the net or IM...

Privacy concerns

[drdale]

One thing to investigate when you are setting this up is your school's policies on student privacy. At my university, at least, we have to be a little careful about letting students see other students' work. I often do (low-tech) peer review sessions; I will have students read drafts of each others' papers and give comments. It is all anonymous, because in my classes I never have students put their names on any assignment or exam; I do it all my grading by the last 4 digits of their ID numbers. And it is voluntary; I do this on the day papers are due, and those who choose to participate in the peer review get an extension to make corrections. If you choose not to participate, you simply turn in your final draft that day (and leave class early!). Still, my dean told me last term that I need to start having students sign a sheet in which they formally waive their right to privacy and agree to participate in the review.

Teacher problem, not computer problem

[fm6]

Sounds like your instructors are not very good at maintaining the interest of their students. If you need "enforcement" to maintain the attention of the class, something's really wrong with the way the class is being taught.

I adhere to the other extreme: school computers should not be in "computer labs". Students should be using them all the time: taking notes, looking up references on the internet, IMing relevent data to classmates without disturbing the class as a whole, etc. Yeah, this can be abused. But if students are not motivated and involved in the classwork, they'll find ways to goof off, period.

Don't take my word for it. Look at schools that have followed this philosophy. Higher test scores, increased attendance, increased interest in writing...

Re:Use Slashcode

[Osty]

Post an essay topic, let the kids review the submissions with mod points given to your favorite students. Just like Slashdot.

Or better yet, use Scoop [kuro5hin.org] and let everybody moderate. Picking favorites is just asking for trouble. I'm sure you could give mod points to everyone in Slashcode as well, but I don't know how much hacking this would involve.

Anyway, both engines are probably excessive for the job at hand. Something along the lines of PHP-Nuke [phpnuke.org] would likely be more than sufficient.

Lord of the Files

[mikeophile]

Thanks for the karma, but I was being a little sarcastic. Since no one is calling me on it, I'll do it myself.

Giving an elite few the ability to moderate posts on the basis of favoritism barely works on Slashdot, let alone a high school classroom.

Imagine the resentment that could be generated towards the class mods for weighted moderation.

Imagine the abuse of power that a mod could use against a classmate they didn't like.

Teachers have favored students, no question. But giving mod points on that basis would undermine at least the illusion of fairness.

I think the only reason Slashdot works at all is the relative anonymity of the posters. Most moderation here seems to be on the basis of the posts alone.

If you use Slashcode in the classroom , give everyone a mod point per topic. I think it will save you a lot of headache later.

If anyone thinks this is some sort of commentary about our beloved Slashdot , you might be right. I'm only a little bitter about never getting any mod points myself.

it's usually to catch cheating

[Trepidity]

Usually the way these things work is by comparing against a giant database of "papers available on the web" and using various algorithms for judging similarity. This catches at least 95% of people who downloaded a paper from the web and made minor changes to it. In CS, where submissions are usually electronic, profs will often augment this database with all previous submissions for the course, sometimes dating back a decade or so. This catches at least 95% of people who copied an assignment from a friend who took the class a year or two ago (or even someone who graduated 5 years ago) and made minor changes (like search-replace on variable names, or some minor structural reworking) to it. Obviously this is harder to do in the humanities, unless you require electronic submissions in some format parsable as text or you OCR everything turned in.

As for unattributed quotes, you're certainly correct there. It's a completely intractable problem: the only way to know for sure that a particular sentence (or paragraph) was not plagiarized from somewhere is to check it against every single paragraph ever written in the history of the written word. Checking against some common sources might work decently though, especially if limited to a specific field (i.e. you can probably catch a significant percentage of plagiarized paragraphs in an anthropology paper by using a database of the 1000 most-cited anthropology books/papers).

But in any case, these things are mainly targetted at outright cheating: copying entire essays or large portions of essays from someone else.

I don't think so...

[TWX]

I have to disagree. People will, by their very nature, take the path of least resistance, for what they want to do. If you provide a kid, an adolescent, or a college student with something that they would rather be doing, rather than the prescribed activity, they will do what they want, more often than not.

Education is dictatorial. You're not supposed to get what you want, you're supposed to get what the educational institution offers. By and large, students don't like this. The ones that do are usually in classes whose names are appended in "A", "AP", and "H", and even there you find the bored genius going insane. (S)he'll learn if you provide the knowledge, but if you provide a ready-made distraction, you've just lost.

English needs to be taught in an an immersive way, in my opinion. Computers do not help English instruction.

Thank you Bill Bennet

[fm6]

You've just given a prime example of what's wrong with most debates about education. It's all idealogy, and no facts

You've got a lot of half-assed generalizations and pet theories. My lack of interest in these is extreme. Let's talk about real-world teachers. I've known good ones and bad ones. Good ones don't care about distractions -- they even use them. Bad ones blame their failures on distractions, immoral influences, "human nature" -- everything except their own lack of skill.

But I am grateful to you for one thing: you've made me invent a new epigram: Fascism is the last refuge of the inept.

Re:Waaay back in the 90's

[badbrainsg]

I teach literature and writing at a smallish midwestern university with a strong engineering and technical emphasis. I've used computers/email/web pages/computerized classrooms for several years.

Currently I'm teaching technical writing in a networked classroom. The advantages are many; the disadvantages are pretty much web-surfing, game-playing and reading email.

My university uses Blackboard, a commercial product that works very well, does a lot of different things, and is easy to use. There are other products, commercial and other, that probably work as well as Blackboard.

My point is, see if you can't get a program that already exists to use; why reinvent the bulletin board or chatroom?

Some of the advantages I've found:

course materials available 24/7 without waste of trees (actually have had students rebuke me for printing and handing out hard copy)

interactivity among students (and instructor) that can extend beyond class time.

online exercises of various kinds that lead directly to reports.

Do people "write better" when they use computers? Probably not. However, I'm not going to use a typewriter or pencil and paper because of the convenience of editing, revisiong, conflating files that computers make possible.

I'd suggest you go slow in trying new things in your new teaching environment. Too many new things at once can be confusing and exhausting. And the concern some posters expressed about your students adapting to the computers is good. How much will you have to teach the students so that they can use the technology? When I began using email in classes, I had to teach them how to use Elm and WordPerfect. Now they come into class with much more knowledge.

Anyway, good luck.

Re:Waaay back in the 90's

[undetrerbrucke]

Incorporating computers in an English class may give you the opportunity to examine the ways in which technology affects our thought processes and therefore our communication.

One earlier poster said to completely disallow AOLisms. I suppose this means things like LOL or RTFM, etc. I would tend to disagree. Allowing these types of things â" in fact, encouraging them â" gives you a chance to examine them. It's a fact of life that computers are changing the way we communicate and even order our thoughts.

These changes are very recent phenomena but they open up the discussion for other technological changes in the way we communicate. For instance, you could trace the development of different types of "literature" through various technological innovations. It may be difficult to think of oral tradition as a technological innovation (or even literature), but there were very organized methods necessary to transfer a body of knowledge from one generation to the next. When the written word came along, it began to formalize language, providing more structure to our communications and eventually ordering the way we form the thoughts in our head. When the printing press came along, we are suddenly dealing with mass-communication and all of the new rules and structures that come with it.

These are all innovations in the long history of communication and literature, but you can take the computer, a piece of technology for which they've witnessed the development, and use it to point to and compare with these other innovations. Then, choose pieces of literature that illustrate literary concepts from each of these technological ages

You might check out Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter J Ong. You could try Life On The Screen by Sherry Turkle. These point to ways that technology affects communication and culture.

Re:Do you really want peer critiques?

[tres]

One of the most insightful and effective ways I've seen peer-reveiw used was by having people respond to essays they liked.

Each student was assigned to quickly review everyone else's submission for that week and choose at least two essays that they wanted to respond to.

The incentive, was purely positive. As a student you push yourself harder not only because your paper would be available for public review, but also to get positive feedback from classmates.

Unlike most classroom peer-review, the feedback was sincere. Because everything took place in a public forum, where both essays and responses were in public view, the writer was accountable to the auditors of the work.

Traditional peer-review doesn't work, because students either tear each other down, with very little intellectual prowess, or bolster each other so that when it becomes their turn, their feelings won't get hurt. Ninety percent of the time, students are judging other students, not the merits of the work.

Peer-review where both essays and responses are to be audited by the rest of the students makes peer-review a much more effective tool. It holds each individual accountable not only to the faculty responsible for teaching the class, but also to the rest of the class.

The key to this whole thing is that the "teacher" must also be a part of this process. Actively responding to each essay from each student.

unless

[waspleg]

those students are tech saavy and use something like trillian that has built in 128 bit encryption...

of course they might stick out a bit too

(insert subversive evil cable-theft voice)
unless all the clients use encryption and then you'll never know muhaha

My $0.02

[tmortn]

First off you have to embrace computers and the internet if you intend to teach a class with a live internet connection.

By embrace I mean do not try and treat it like a regular classroom. Students WILL type constantly either on topic or off topic especially if they have a live internet connection and if that is disruptive to your method of instruction run far and run fast from the lab NOW !!! Seriously it will never work and even if it does all your going to do is frustrate the students sitting there with computers and not being able to use them. Quiet click keyboards would help immensly but boards in labs are generally loud clackers and the very lively accoustics of most rooms don't help.

My suggestion would be to not plan on Verbal lecturing at all, if you do need to have lectures schedule them in a room away from the computers if at all possible. I would suggest some sort of obvious progression where students read and post their thoughts as directed by your questions to answer or discuss etc.... Classtime can be used for class discussion thread style. I would set up some sort of scoring system with you as the score keeper... IE offtopic and flamebait takes points off, pertinent posts score according to some scale you have. Goal of students is to reach a passing point.

*** random idea which would need software that could handle it *** Student is given 5 posts per topic. Posts are rated by the teacher in say two or three categories ( say grammer, quality of content for starters ) score is on a 1-10 scale which can be multiplied by 2, added all together and divided by the number of categories for ye olde 100 point scale

At anyrate you get the idea. Instead of verbal lectures you outline the discussion in a written aggenda. I personally would say take the lecture notes, note the pertinent areas of discussion and link in the text to the appropriate place to post responses... In passage I want you to the consequences of actions. Then Repeat ad neaseum for all needed points of discussion. Include your lecture material in addition as well. Then spend the time during calss monitoring what is being added to the discussion and offering one on one feedback going around the room.... constant moving will also enable you to keep something of an eye on poor choices of web pages for information sources.

Project Ideas

[cfradenburg]

The first thing you need to do with a class like this is make it interactive to keep the students interested. Have them talk about their projects and critic each other in class.

Now that I've said that, on to some ideas. I've broken them down by whether the focus is on writing or literature.

Writing:
Have them pick a more advanced feature of one of the programs on the computer and write instructions about how to use it.
For creative writing have them try and trick the spell checker.

Literature:
Many classics are no longer copyrighted and hence are available free online which makes them rather accessible. You should also be able to find different translations of the same work (such as Dante's Divine Comedy.) Take advantage of these.

Combination:
There are many amatuer writing sites (mostly poetry). Have the students compare what's there to stuff that is commercially published.
There are many documents archived online from recent and not so recent language as well as many documents that us "IM speak." Students can research how the English language has changed over the years.


These are just some ideas. There are also many teacher resource sites. There is a collection of links here [cves.org] that is kept up to date. The other sites I can think of off hand are Marco Polo and Ask Eric. If you are intereseted in more let me know, I'm sure I can find more.

Teach em web useability

[quilgy]

Given it's English class and computer driven, you could teach them how to write for the web, and about web useability. No doubt a lot of them will be wanting to author their own websites in coming years, so get them educated about writing for screen reading instead of print.

Re:Don't Don't Don't

[DMDx86]

If the students want to squander their time, then thats their problem! In college, its no longer the responsibility of the school to force the student to learn.

Some people know how to multitask, dont ruin it.

My Experiences

[Wtcher]

Well, I'll keep it short. I went to a University which had developed, as one of its founding principles, an online learning bent. We had what was called a Course Management System which was used to distribute course text (notes were online, text readings were online), had an integrated syllabus, could be used to submit homework, did contain instructor presentations, had asynchronous forums for every course and also provided many other things I don't recall. This dream system has since been replaced by something much better behaved cross-platform and which is also less effective. You may want to visit www.surrey.sfu.ca for more information - my university was subsumed into this one and is now a smaller satellite campus - of sorts.

Also, you may be able to find some further resources at http://www.netvironments.org/nne/ as this is also a tool which can be used to facilitate cooperative learning. I'm afraid I never explored this one to its true potential, so I'm not entirely aware as to what it's capable of - however, it does not seem to have any forums. On the other hand, users can produce their own "home pages" with which they could theoretically blog, and it does have a nice interface.

I've also participated in a number of forum-based classes. Here are some pointers:

You want a discussion facilitator - preferably more than one, really. I hesitate to say moderator, since their functions encompass far more than that.

If you set deadlines, some learners will post some short periods of time right before the deadline. Unfortunately, by that point much of the content has been rehased to some degree. This is less advice than an observation.

I can't think of anything else at the moment. If you ask me for more specifics, I'll be happy to provide. :) Oh, and my university's name was the Technical University of British Columbia.

If you want to ask some students about their experiences and such, feel free to visit http://www.tekbc.com :)

AIML bots

[aimlguru]

Introduce the open standard AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) to your students and let them create their own chat bot!

Challenge them to compose a believable character and let the chat bots talk to each other.

Information about AIML can be found at: http://www.aiml.info

AIML interpreters can be downloaded from http://www.alicebot.org.

An example of a chat bot can be found at: http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=9ba1 2d545e345254

weblogs are not collaborative tools

[1gor]

...by design since they are not "multi-user". They are more like individual diaries. You would to give your users opportunity to interact with each other with some community software like Geeklog [geeklog.net] or OpenACS [openacs.org].

Re:Mod parent up!

[ProlificSage]

I agree whole-heartedly. I took Freshman English at the University of Connecticut, which is where the OP is planning to teach. That was 1985. We didn't need computers then.

The problem I see with most non-technical classes these days is that the profs get so enamoured with the technology that they lose sight of what's important - the content.

That said, the computer could be used for online collaboration, peer review, etc. However, I would limit the use of the Internet connection to the outside world to non-class hours. It's useful if you're in your dorm and need to check something at 2 a.m., but students should not have the added distraction of an active connection to the outside world during class.