you all must watch this video that my students had us watch- go to video.google.com and type in loose change, then just go to the second edition and watch. it's a very very controversial causal movie. please give me your thoughts asap.

claudia

Fellow 15ians--

Error! Error! My Calper wiki has crashed and exploded! Does this sound familiar to any of you: when I click on any of the links within my wiki site (not just individual student blog pages but even the usersettings and recentchanges pages) this pops up:

Query failed: select * from wikipersnickety_pages where comment_on = 'NotesOnDefinitionEssay' and latest = 'Y' order by time (Can't open file: 'wikipersnickety_pages.MYI' (errno: 145))

Errno: 145 must have something to do with it, as that's the error number that comes up with every failed click. I clicked around on the English dept. Wiki Farm site, also hosted by Calper, and some sites showed the same problem while others did not.

Any ideas??

Not panicking yet,

Stephanie

Rich--

I have a student whose performance is extremely poor. She is bright but lazy. Out of the five papers assigned she has done two. In addition, she barely ever blogs and often fails to come to class prepared. She also has seven absences. She received a D on one of the two papers she completed. The paper provided no argument and failed to follow the criteria required (analogical argument criteria posted to the wiki). I truly felt that the paper had been written for another class. I say this because this student is bright and intelligent. She is a decent writer and a strong thinker. The only negative is that she's lazy and attempts to cut corners. Because I do not have her schedule and cannot contact her professors I cannot prove my suspicion. Yesterday she sent me an email asking if she could rewrite the paper for a grade no higher than a C. She said she worked really hard on the paper and was upset about the grade she received. At this point my patience has worn thin. If she were a hard worker, a student truly dedicated to improving then I would have no problem with granting her request. But given her consistent lack of interest, performance and attendance, (which she was warned about earlier in semester) I find it really difficult to take additional time to assist a person who has been for so long unwilling to take heed of my warnings and help herself. Given these circumstances I feel as though her request is unfair and insincere. I feel that her request is motivated by an attempt to salvage what is about to be a failing grade. Please advise me on how to proceed.

Ersula

far in advance, but I need to start thinking about buying my plane ticket...when should we have the grades in for english 15? can we do it online or do we need to be in state college? and will we get a program in which to input the grades? Is it a complicated and time-consuming process?

claudia

So, there was some stuff on the syllabus about final projects and doing a zine, and frankly it made no sense to me, since we haven't talked about final projects yet in 602. As such, I decided to delete it to head off questions about it that would otherwise arise and be unanswerable by me. Maybe we could go over final projects in 602 on Thursday, as I am still uncertain what I am assigning. --Peter

So have I been missing reading assignments from the text? Suddenly they are assigned something from page 60 of understanding comics, but I didn't see anywhere that they were assigned to read the first 60 pages.

Jamie

Rich,

Do I have to accept late papers? Life would be sssooooooo MUCH easier. I was looking under "Due Dates" and you've yet to set a policy. --Ersula

I left that policy open in order to spur such discussion. I say don't accept them without a medical excuse, but am open to other arguments. -- Rich

Some clarification about the narratives:

With this first assignment, we are really just trying to establish a

writing and revision rhythm and establish connections among the

students.

When grading, I would focus on how much they seemed to be making

rhetorical choices. The remix should introduce students to the idea

that they can try out different effects in their mind to see which

effect they prefer, so that the act of composition always includes a

sequence of choices.

OrientationFeedback

A great how-to on posting pictures that are not already on the web to your wiki.

[how to post a picture]

Courtesy of one of my students. -Rebecca

Rich, when we grade the Self-Narratives are there specific things that we should be looking for? I think the classes would appreciate it if we could give them some specifics about what we expect. -Sarah

I'm also a little curious about grading standards on the narrative paper. It seems to me like the assignment has very few requirements, and so should be graded pretty easily. This is nice, since it's the first paper, and this is the first week of college classes for them, so I think a strictly graded paper would mostly just be demoralizing (after all, we haven't taught them much yet). The thing I worry about, though, is that when grading standards tighten up for paper #2 this is going to cause a certain amount of trouble. I guess I'll just make it very clear that the first paper is sort of a gimme, but that the second one will not be so easy, and they might expect a lower grade for similar quality of work on it. --Peter

Rich (and others),

For Sept 5, students are to "sample" from other narratives (w/ attribution). What is meant by sample? Does it differ significantly from linking?

Kem

Are the books for english 15 at all the bookstores (student books, used books, and the university bookstore)? -Jess

I'm not sure if others are encountering this- My class has taken to the wiki like fish to water, but I'm noticing that especially in emails and on the wiki itself, they are... excessivly informal, for lack of better phrasing. I was wondering what others thought about this- what the difference is between a more traditional, text-oriented course, and one in which students are blogging? How are students' attitutes and ways of respoonding to both the instructor and each other changing in the face of such new "technologies" as the wiki? If anyone is interested in discussing this, I would love to explore this issue further.

-Jen

Jen, I think this is important to talk about. I don't know what I think yet, but I've made a link to a page on my wiki where we can continue the conversation. I might direct my students to it at some point, but not yet. Check out FormalityLevel and post your thoughts. (You need to register to post on my blog, but there's no password except the one you make for yourself.)

My policy towards formality level is going to be that anything goes on blogs, but papers should be written more formally. For me, the really important thing about the blogs is that they get used to writing and to communicating with each other, and I'm happy for them to do so in a whatever way is most comfortable to them. So if they they want to write lol, roflmao, wtf, omg, or fail to capitalize the personal i, I'm happy to let it pass. But on papers I will, of course, be asking for proper grammar, appropriate vocabulary, etc. This is just my take on it, I think you all should do as you please. --Peter

I'm not sure where on the wiki to put this...someone move it if there's a better place.

This is a link to Scott McCloud's blog -- very interesting; probably not appropriate for English 15. But definitely worth looking at, especially when we begin with the comics text.

1. why they chose the license?- Where do they write their brief argument for why they chose the particular license that they did? on their blogs? do they email us the argument? or it doesn't matter?

claud

Hi Claudia:

I think they should make it part of their first blogs. If they don't have anything to blog about - and they may think they don't - the license can provide them with an occasion and decision. I wanted to have them choose a license so that they know that a decision about intellectual property is increasingly a part of rhetorical practice. It might also get them thinking about who should own the knowledge produced by universities, all which receive numerous subsidies from the public.

how to make a link in shtuff - a great How-To by Octavio

Possible issue: The Creative Commons License link (that copy and past business after you answer the questions) is not formatted properly for all the wikis. Can I recommend that my students just put the "name" of the license they choose (displayed on the same page as the link) on their blogs? Otherwise, it takes some time and effort to sort out the syntax of the link and make it compatible with the wiki.--RWL (on the wikifarm)

Yes, just put the name describing the license, and make a link with the word, like this: Creative Commons License Attribution 2.5

2. Does anyone know how to change image sizes in pbwiki (or wiki farm)?

I'm not sure if you can do it on the wiki itself, but you can open the image in Photoshop (available in most lab computers) and The Gimp ( free editing software you can download off the web). Several students in English 15 will know how to do it, so let them teach you! -MitoChondriac

Okay, question: If our students are choosing "handles" so that they can be anonymous on the blog, how does it work when they sign in? Does their e-mail and sign in name show up anywhere?

I tried to broach the topic of the hurricane to the class this morning, but no one seemed very willing to run with it. I introduced it by first introducing the Daily Collegian, which had 3 front page articles on the storm, and asking if anyone had friends or relatives in NO (no one did), and asking who had been following the news, and talking a little about how strangely the flow of information has trickled down to us. Like I said, though, no one really seemed to want to say much about it (at least not in class), so I let it drop, and didn't work it into the assignment at all. I might suggest that they blog about it, though, if it happens to be a topic of interest to them. --Peter

>>>Peter, I broached the topic in two ways. First, I asked if any of their other classes had brought it up (most hadn't) and encouraged them to write about it in their blogs. Second I brought in a copies of USA Today and The New York Times. I simply read the headlines, and asked them to think about why the narratives seemed so different. This was a way to discuss audience, and make the point that what we'd been talking about regarding Narrative plays itself out all the time, even in our news outlets. Having said that, I'm not sure if I'd bring it up too often. It'll likely appear in their blogs now that you've demonstrated to them that it's not a taboo topic. --Kem