ENGS 345: Practicum in Teaching Writing

Here’s a music video for a musical about a party thrown for time-travelers, filmed entirely within the virtual world of Second Life:

Massively blog’s Moo Money has this to say:

This video is apparently based on a new musical, The Time Travelers Convention. Three students hold a convention where they put flyers in classic books, hoping that one day a time traveler will come to their party. When one actually shows up, they must face what they want to change in their lives.

Read the whole post (it’s not long), and then check out the musical. Sounds like a lot of fun!

…And here’s one more amusing time-travel video. Just because I like time travel, and Terminator parodies…:

Here’s what we discussed today, setting out the top-level, and the initial micro-level changes and issues we wanted to address in this revision:

BIG ISSUES

• The number of readings — too few?
• The number of explorations — too many?
• The pacing of the explorations — too bunched up?
• The length of the explorations — should they be different lengths, or all 1-page?
• Are the explorations sufficiently differentiated?
• Do we need to foreground and emphasize “so what?” issues and development more strongly?
• More of the writing work needs to be done in-class; should this be explicit in the sequence?
• Some explorations are analytical, while others are “generative”; is the balance between these okay?
• “Show-Don’t-Tell” is a major component of this sequence — does it need to become more explicit and get introduced earlier?

That’s a lot of big issues, and I’m excited to see how we address all of them in our revision! Here are the hot spots we identified in our initial discussion as places we wanted to revise:

HOT SPOTS

• The order of readings — does it make sense, and is it as productive as it could be?
• Exploration 4 comes out of nowhere and goes… nowhere; how do we integrate it into the sequence in an organic, productive way?
• Possible reading additions to the sequence: “Dr. Ecstasy,” “Rememberance of Things Future,” and “Almost Before We Spoke We Swore”?
• Does it make pedagogical and cognitive sense to switch the order of explorations 2 andf 3?
• Exploration 1 raises important issues, but most students were unable to (or unaware that they should) engage with the serious complexities of the usage of “inquiry” and “argument” by both Green and Folger. RE-WRITE Exploration 1 so that it encourages (forces?) students to do this important work
• Exploration 4 — does it really emphasize the need for a “so what?” enough?
• Exploration 9 — does it really emphaszie the need for an argument enough?

So, for Thursday:

• Read: “Dr. Ecstasy,” “Rememberance of Things Future,” and “Almost Before We Spoke We Swore”
• Re-write Exploration 1 as you see fit and bring 7 copies with you to class
• Go through the sequence from Exploration 1 to Essay 2 and mark up places you want to change, including as much of the text of those revisions as you can