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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008G37IrvinDesigning New Media Systems of First-Year Composition Delivery across Multiple Institutions This session featured Fred Kemp, Rich Rice, Nathan Jahnke and Marc Wilson who presented a description of their recent work on a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Grant to redesign first-year composition. Originally a collaboration between Texas Tech University (TTU) and Dallas County Community College (DCCC), the grant represents an effort to apply the systems delivery principles developed at Texas Tech in regard to multi-modal, just-in-time instruction. Kemp stressed that this effort was an attempt to develop a malleable model for systems delivery that could conform to local situations and be resistant to a unified approach. A considerable amount of the grant team’s effort has been devoted to taking high quality videos produced by DCCC for its tele-course delivery of first-year composition and “chunking” them into videos on specific writing topics, videos ranging in length from thirty seconds to two minutes. These video chunks are then hyperlinked into student commentary within a distributed grading context. As Rice voiced some of the questions that framed the redesign grant: Does using video to teach composition increase writing transfer? Would students be more likely to view these videos, and would they learn something more than if there were just written commentary on their writing? Rice went on to link the uses of these multi-modal learning tools to the theories of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Post-Process Theory, and Adragogy (theories of adult learning). Nathan Jahnke then demonstrated how the videos would be inserted and what they looked like, though the team is still working out the technical mechanics. Marc Wilson then talked about how the TTU systems model has been adopted and adapted at his institution, Ivy Tech State College. Wilson discussed how Ivy Tech has many of the same problems as TTU in its composition program, including a high faculty turnover rate and few faculty with expertise in teaching writing. Wilson next discussed the difficulty of changing the teaching culture to accept this distributed grading system, and how teachers needed time to switch their roles from dispensers of wisdom to mentors of wisdom. The greatest benefit of his school's venture into distributed grading is that it has opened doors across classrooms, claimed Wilson. The session concluded with the presenters describing the future of the project since the grant team is near the end of the development phase and entering the implementation phase. The larger systems approach in the future should have a menu of possibilities and range of capabilities so that local sites can adapt it for their context, argued the group. For example, Rice described how the system could allow for uploading of videos and other content created by individual instructors, and then this content could be tailored to fit that instructor's or program's culture. Technologically, the ultimate goal, as Kemp said, is to make the system “simpler to use than not to use it.” The pedagogical and programmatic mission of this project is to develop a means for improving the teaching and learning of writers in first-year composition across an entire department or program. |