Well, P'english-ites:
Thanks for all your assignments, all signed, sealed and delivered here. This is, as I've told many of you, the first time I have tried to use this blog as an interactive forum for sharing work. I'm learning a few things from this process and wanted to share a few of these lessons here before we
go further.
1. "To spam filter or not to spam filter (that is the question): when many people post at the same time, blogger's spam filter automatically holds them until the site administrator (that's me) can review them. that's why many of your comments were not posted after you submitted them. Now that we know this, I can ask that if your post doesn't appear, please don't resubmit it, or it will simply clog up the post thread! (I'll make sure it posts at the assignment date)
2. It really IS cool to see all your work in one place. For all of you, this is actually something new: you now get to see what I see, namely all students' work, side-by-side. My intention is NOT to make this competitive, as I think writing is either clear, logical, and interesting, or it isn't. Still, now that you see everybody's ideas, there's no doubt that work that doesn't get it right stands out. We're on stage now, fellow writers, and it's our job to make a solid case to our peers: no suckage allowed.
3. I can't respond individually to individual comments on the post thread. :(
This is the one significant drawback to this platform: blogger doesn't allow "cross-posting" of comments TO other comments, like you're all so used to on facebook. (It's a tradeoff of getting many more characters of text per post) As a result, on part of our next assignment, when we respond to each others' ideas, you'll probably have to take all your notes on paper, the old-fashioned way, noting all your examples and their original authors, as you can't easily jump in and out of different positions on the comment thread. Still, this is pretty easy with paper (I'm right now looking at my list of all your post names, with various codes and comments I'll be posting for you); just keep in mind that the less you worry about "doing stuff with the technology" and the more you focus on "just doing stuff on paper with the ideas that the technology lets us all (without any postage, emails, or reams of photocopies) see everyone else's stuff, with the links where they got it, " the better off you'll be.
Now, enough of what I have to say: read EVERYONE ELSE's STUFF, including the other classes':
Sophomores, it's not to early to start checking out all the interesting current events and issues the juniors are writing about.
Juniors, let's review those rules of passive, weak, and wordy sentences that those Sophomores are doing. (you'll need to have those down, too!)
Happy reading.
-P'eng-Tzu
12 comments:
I'm encouraging everyone to leave a personal comment here about what it's like to do school work in this kind of public fashion. What do you find different about seeing each others' work here compared to what happens when we share it in the classroom? (Or does it feel the same?) How does publishing longer pieces of writing differ from posting the little tidbits and witty banter that fills twitter or facebook posts? Does it make the task of our writing more "real" in any way? etc.
I look forward to your thoughts and encourage you to respond to the ideas others leave here.
I'm definitely pro- blog comment essays.
Posting school work online so that it's public lets us actually get to know our peers' writing styles. It allows us to share ideas in an intellectual setting as opposed to a social networking website. It's very motivating.
Also, it saves a lot of paper.
There are times when I get "writer's block" and I don't have examples to look at/refer to at home. Now, all I have to do is go on drpenglish.blogspot.com and look at how other students articulate their own writing.
I think what we are doing something great here... especially if we consider how students and teachers before us never had the opportunity to utilize the Internet as an educational tool. Also, we can actually save quite a few trees in the process if we submit works online!
I think that it's a lot easier to view writings on the web, being that it will always be there and easily referenced. Also, I feel that my time is better spent reading my peers essays on the web than reading facebook posts and commentary. Also helps me in the writing process, seeing the structure of other essays. 'Tis a good thing!
On the whole I agree with the previous two comments: as far as I can tell, utilizing the Internet has many advantages, and very few disadvantages. For instance,submitting work online eliminates the "faulty printer" and "forgot it at home" variables, while also offering solid, permanent proof of the submission. Also, it's obviously very helpful to have fellow students' work as examples to learn from, and in the same vein may offer incentive to do well on assignments, since they'll be on public display effectively! However, unfortunately there isn't a practical way to converse with the teacher, comment on comments, and Internet isn't always reliable at home, as we all know!
Despite all this, I still think Internet usage for class is on the whole a great idea!
I'm going to agree with the last anonymous; I can really see P's point that it would be better if a different software/site could make it as easy to use as this, and still allow comments TO other people's comments. I also really wanted to echo the whole point about being "public." I'll admit, it was a little more pressure knowing that even a little assignment like this would be seen. At the same time, (and I'm not kissing @$$ here) this really is something the Peng-man has been saying over and over since Freshman year: we're at an art school and we do performances and master classes all the time. I go with "it's people paying attention that makes it real." So, I'm digging it, overall, and if anyone else has used interactive software that could do something like this even better, I'm betting the Doktor would check it out...
I second that juniormental: the call is out P'engophiles and especially to tech-savvy P'engineers: if you can find a better way, here's to it. I'm down.
I concur with both JuniorMental and the last Anonymous completely, I feel that they brought up some great points. I'd like to reiterate the notion of finding a new platform to communicate on that makes it easier to converse and follow threads of intellectual banter. Though I wouldn't call my self a P'Engineer, in a holistic sense of the word :p, but I think that Google+ may be a good place to move the conversation to.
MyTwo Cents: I absolutely loved reading all of the posts because reading the work gave an insight into many of my peers minds that I had not experienced, and may not have. By reading their work, I found out about each of my peers; what they are interested in and how they write beyond L337 and abbreviated ideas of 140 characters that the internet inherently draws out of us. I feel that I now know a little bit of the Intellectual side of many of my peers who in my mind were just great artists.
For a wordy writer like me, I appreciated the word limit for comments; it forced me to be decisive in trimming excess, and to keep my flow of ideas clearer.
I also would like Dr. P to consider making posts about good reads (esp. books).
Not having the instruction of Dr.P before, this way of working was an incredible help. It was very helpful to use the other students work so I could somewhat understand the type of essay I was supposed to be writing. I felt very little pressure or anxiety, as I usually do with essays because I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing and I felt GOOD about my work at the end.I definitely my writing to be important and more "real" than that of facebook and twitter posts we make on a daily basis. Dear Dr.P, I hope for this style of turning in assignments to be frequent in the upcoming year.
I agree with the majority of comments here, however I do think that if this is something that becomes a regular thing (leaving our homework as comments) we would need to have some sort of meeting where we can discuss the problems that this process might produce.
For instance, my internet goes out quite often. I think that there should be the option of turning a hard copy in the next day. There's also the question of whether or not hand-written work would be accepted. I also think that for safety reasons and to eliminate the pressure aspect maybe we could all have screen names or some type of number that would hide our actual name but still be easy for Dr. P to know who's who.
I'm thinking, last anonymous, that you might be missing the whole point: I also feel what you're calling "the pressure aspect," but don't we face that every day (note the two words, Dr. P! ;) in our art classes? We're always pressured there to not suck, basically total peer pressure, even if a teacher is there or even grading us. IMHO, I totally was surprised by how much this made me want to write well, maybe as much (or even more?) than a grade would. Nobody wants to suck, so as tough as it is for me to say this, I think that if P'eng-Tzu does use this at all during the school year, he should not give us that safety valve of hiding ourselves. Look at it this way: when was the last time you really had to think in an intellectual way to post something on facebook? but you just published three pieces of your writing for people to see and think about. Cool.
sophomoronic
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