Spring 2019 Writing Center Class

What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the various multi-modal formats (Powerpoint, podcast, etc.). Do students have a particular fondness or distaste for certain formats? What are the common issues/problems that arise in these types of mediums?

1.      What do students typically need help with when putting together their multimodal assignments? 2.      What are the typical problems and questions that students have when constructing their multimodal projects? 3.      Do I need to be a tech whizz?

The audio essay sounds wonderfully creative, and I would love to see some of the student essays created for this class. A couple of questions come to mind. How do we make sure all students are sufficiently tech savvy to complete these assignments? Current debates around the so-called "digital divide" suggest that not all societal groups have equal access to communication technologies and the internet. Have you encountered such challenges in your classroom? If so, how did you address them? I was also wondering how we might want to handle various ethical issues raised by multimodal assignments. For instance, how do we ensure interviewee anonymity? The interviewees' voices (coupled with the personal stories they choose to tell) may be recognizable. Of course, this would be more of a concern with video essays, but audio podcasts may raise challenges in this regard as well. These innovative projects are fascinating, and I look forward to our conversation tomorrow!

I really like how this assignment calls the "podcast" an audio essay and seems like a wonderful and challenging alternative to the usual analytical essay. I wonder, though, for what type of class would this be an ideal project? It seems to me that because of the highly communicative nature of the assignment, it would best suit those students majoring in a field that requires this kind of interaction--mass communications and journalism are two that come immediately to mind. I worry about how this would go over in a general education course where the student mix includes some very shy students (those who rarely participate in class discussions) who would be petrified at the thought of engaging in a recorded conversation with their peers, let alone having to interview strangers. So, for whom would you recommend this assignment? And, if one were to use this in a gen ed classroom, how would you recommend encouraging students who might not be comfortable fulfilling the requirements

Blog Post #10 Consuelo Helping writers from disciplines outside mine has been less challenging than I expected.  Even, I would say that it is rewarding to work particularly with graduate students from unfamiliar disciplines to me. As I expected, they know their subjects well so the content becomes a given.  The focus of the tutoring then centers on the writing per se. Here it becomes relevant what Ryan and Zimmerelli (2016, 72) point out, “[r]egardless of a paper’s topic, you can determine whether the ideas are presented in a cohesive and persuasive manner.  You can look at larger issues—like organization, style, and tone—or at smaller issues—like grammar and mechanics—and determine whether the writing is effective.”    This semester, I have been working with graduate students from different fields. Regardless of the field (e.g., marketing, statistics, language acquisition) the experiences have been gratifying. However, helping writers, in particular, undergraduate students, a

Most of the papers "outside my discipline" that I have read as a tutor have been online papers. I have dealt with a few applications to the College of Nursing and a paper on cancer research. As a tutor offering feedback on these essays and papers, I did not feel that they required much prior knowledge of nursing or medical scholarship. The application essay prompts invited prospective nursing students to reflect on their experiences with diversity and community service, so these were pretty easy to go through and comment on. I mostly encouraged students to be as specific as possible and describe in detail particular events or activities they had been involved in. The paper on cancer research was a review of the scholarly literature on the association between consumption of smokeless non-tobacco products and oral cancer, and it was meant for publication. This paper seemed to be a very early draft; it had many problems with organization, presentation of findings, grammar, and s