Risks/Trade-offs | 8 Levels | Adapting Assignments | Reactions | Suggestions | Works Cited

Student Reactions
At the end of the semester I interviewed 16 students about their reactions to the assignment to determine what went well and what needed to be improved. I tape recorded their reactions, then gathered a few clips to illustrate what they thought with their own voices. Each comment is about 5-15 seconds long, but it might take about the same length of time to download the wave files for each one, depending on your connection speed. Here is what they said:

Bryan: "Um . . . I thought it was pretty cool 'cuz, uh, ... never done anything like this, uh ... it was just fun to ... you know, put somethin' up on the net and everything, just, you know, see it up there ..." [2.2M]

Stacey: “oh, I was a little scared . . .!” [991k]

Will: "I mean I've just figured I could do it ... ["good"] ... especially, like, since you gave the A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 ["options"], yeah, once I figured that I was going to have trouble with the one, I assumed that I could just do the other one without too much trouble. ["Good point. I'm really glad that you said that because that's one of the things I wanted to establish was the abilities of the students to do computers shouldn't really be a requirement in a writing course, so there's a criteria there that I didn't want to enforce very heavily"] ... I would have liked it if we had more time, so you could've, like, had more individual stuff. I mean, I GOT the idea of the web page, but I didn't ... ["but you needed more practice, right?] – right!" [9.5M]

Holly: "At first I was kind of, like, `no, what am I going to do?' ... I just didn't ... it was kind of, like, 'how do you want us to put it together?' ... but ... then you explained it, so ..." [2.1M]

Tricia and Kelly: "I was kind of excited about doing it 'cuz the one that we did in high school I never ... I was never able to upload everything. [Really?] Yeah, and it frustrated me, and so, I was kind of like, excited to have to try it again, and have a little bit of pressure this time to get it done right." Kelly: " Well, I never made a web page before, so I thought it would be interesting." [5.6M]

Sharon: "I was actually excited to do it because I love working with the computer and it's just, like, I'd get out of class, and be, like, `I'm gonna go home and finish the page!'" [1.6M]


* Student Examples: Aimee, Julie M., Amber, Don, Katie, Bryan, Holly, Julie S.