The philosophical orientation of the book is process writing.
It assumes that writing is a process involving recursive steps that a course
would employ, and organization follows that logical order: from developing your
online persona, to lessons and syllabi, to structuring the course and managing
course dialogue, and then to writing response, collaboration, and assessment. In
each section, Warnock provides tips, examples, and questions for consideration.
The aspect of this book that I am using today as I get my
summer online courses up and running is the section “A Word on Redundancy.”
Redundancy helps students remember what to do when. This probably true in any
classroom situation. Warnock provides a list of places he provides deadline
information:
- Syllabus
- Assignment
- Weekly plan
- Response to the rough draft
- Course announcements
- Group email a few days before the deadline (56-57)
Deadlines aren’t the only aspect of the course requiring
redundancy. I used to have weekly folders and put everything for the week in
them. The problem was that sometimes we needed those things in other weeks, and
then even I couldn’t find them! Now, I have a redundant structure where
materials are grouped by purpose (assignments, lectures, readings, etc.), and
they also exist, or I create a link to them, in the weekly folders.
Another aspect of the book that parallels my recent
development as a teacher is the section “How Do We Know They Have Read?” I’ve
been assuming that if we do enough dialogue (informal writing) and formal writing
about reading, I will know whether students have read, and they will know that
reading is important to success in the course. I am particularly careful to
request that students refer to or quote specific passages on specific pages.
This helps in encouraging specificity in analysis. It also indicates that they’ve
read enough to find the quote. In research assignments, I’m headed toward
requiring more summary and synthesis before drafting to ensure that students
have read their source materials and can discuss them as unique wholes rather
than cherry-picking quotations.
However, sometimes, by the time we’re talking and writing
about our reading, it’s too late for those who haven’t read to catch up. So,
after teaching for almost 20 years, I think I’m going to resort to quizzing,
not in an antagonistic way, but in a way that gets students into the text and
reminds them about important aspects of it. And, quizzing in an online
environment is easy because I can set the whole business up to score and post
the scores in the grade book. Here are Warnock’s quizzing recommendations:
- Same day of the week
- Easy questions
- Five-minute time limit
- Create question sets and randomize which are given to each student (to deter cheating; 64-65)
As an experienced online instructor of writing, I benefited
by checking my own practice against Warnock’s step-by-step recommendations, but
as I’ve started to incorporate more multimedia into my teaching (albeit not
very capably yet), I feel as if I could rewrite the book to add those elements
to his discussion. Of course, the book was in progress before many of the current
multimedia tools existed, so I’m sure my feeling is out of line, or maybe
because the field is changing so quickly, the book went out of date quickly and
just needs a second edition. I’d also like to see a more detailed chapter on
online collaboration and an anthology of specific assignments and documents
associated with the various chapters. So, I think this book is good for the
first-time instructor of writing online who just needs the big picture and
general philosophy.
Works Cited
Warnock, Scott. Teaching
Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2009. Print.
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