Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students

Annotation Studio is a web-based annotation application that integrates a powerful set of textual interpretation tools behind an interface that makes using those tools intuitive for undergraduates. Building on students’ new media literacies, this Open-source application develops traditional humanistic skills including close reading, textual analysis, persuasive writing, and critical thinking. Initial features of the Annotation Studio prototype, supported by an NEH Start-Up Grant, include aligned multi-media annotation of written texts, user-defined sharing of annotations, and grouping of annotation by self-defined tags to support interpretation and argument development. The fully developed application will support annotation of image, video and audio documents; annotation visualization; export of texts with annotations; and a media repository. We will also identify best practices among faculty using Annotation Studio in a broad range of humanities classes across the country

Exploring the Impact of Teacher Collaboration on Student Learning: A Focus on Writing

In this yearlong case study, six English teachers in an urban high school in Northern California engaged in sustained collaboration focused on developing and enacting strategies to improve the writing skills of their culturally and linguistically diverse freshmen. The study was conducted between August 2018 and June 2019, to determine the connections, if any, between teacher collaboration and student learning. Qualitative data were analyzed from teacher collaboration and observation of classroom practices, focus groups and teacher-created artifacts. Students’ on-demand writing assessments in fall and spring were compared with instructionally supported writing. Student surveys were analyzed in a mixed methods approach. Findings suggest that students’ writing skills improved and students reported increased confidence in writing and other literacy practices. The lessons developed in the collaboration meetings and observed in practice, in tandem with student and teacher self-reports suggest a positive relationship between teacher collaboration and student learning outcomes

Revision and Re-Writing as Adaptation: Using Adaptation Theory to Encourage Student Recognition of Rhetorical Situations

Many students don’t want to revise their writing, or do so in small, surface-level ways. This has been an issue many composition instructors have faced over the years, and there is a large body of scholarship about revision and the writing process by many in writing studies. From Nancy Sommers, Janet Emig, Donald Murray, and others, to more recent publications “post-process,” composition instructors and writing studies scholars are concerned about revision and the role it plays in students’ learning to write. As a strategy for teaching bigger-level revision, I implemented the use of adaptation theory (reading/watching and doing adaptation) as a way to encourage student buy-in regarding how important revision is. By using adaptation theory to teach rhetorical situations and revision, I conducted a study of students’ changing attitudes towards revision. I studied two classes (about 17 students each) of first year, second semester, composition. I collected written work from participating students and then analyzed this data for evidence of changing attitudes towards revision. How exactly did the use of adaptation theory scaffold or support their learning of bigger-level revision? Many students had much more positive attitudes in the classroom, and towards revision, than in previous courses I have taught. There was an overwhelmingly positive response to students adapting work and looking at adaptations in class as a way to learn how to revise

Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning

Teaching writing across the curriculum with online tool

Teaching to Think & Read Like a Historian

This study explores how a disciplinary literacy framework could impact adolescent comprehension in the content area of social studies. I collected qualitative data by recording interviews with five high school social studies teachers, while also analyzing the school’s curriculum and its integration of literacy. Several findings were acquired from the research: 1) a need to return to the basics of reading and writing; 2) break down the sources for student comprehension of complex texts used in social studies classes; 3) students’ struggle with historical writing; and 4) comprehension literacy strategies used in social studies classrooms. Conclusions from this study are 1) the need of building the fundamental reading and writing skills in secondary instruction; 2) the need to develop students’ writing skills to be successful composing historical essays

A mixed-methods study of feedback modes in EFL writing

As digital technologies have become ubiquitous thanks to the Internet, new modes of feedback in L2 writing have emerged, yet what remains unclear is how feedback given through alternative modes helps improve writing quality and how new feedback tools fit in the overall context of writing instruction. Therefore, the purpose of this embedded mixed-methods study is to assess how three online feedback modes help improve student writing. Thirty-three intermediate Turkish-L1 learners of English received written, audio and screencast feedback in Google Drive to improve their writing in a multi-draft essay-writing task and an essay-revision task with three parallel essays. The results indicated that it was the audio group that made the highest number of correct revisions in the essay-writing task, while there was not a significant difference among the three feedback modes in the essay-revision task. Semi-structured interviews and screen recordings provided qualitative data about their preferences and how they worked with each mode to address both microlevel and macrolevel problems. The participants did not uniformly prefer a particular feedback mode but highlighted the potential benefits and downsides of each mode

FIQWS: Philosophy of Art Composition Section

This course is taken in conjunction with the Philosophy of Art topic section, Our readings and writings will focus on art. What is your relationship to art? How do you interact with art? You will be able to choose your own areas of interest when writing about art and artists. Although our work in this class will reflect your study in the topic section, it will have some flexibility and will focus more on good writing rather than particular subject matter. However, in your papers for the composition section, you are welcome to use philosophical terms and methods of talking about art that you have learned in the topic section

CORRELATION BETWEEN THE USE OF FACEBOOK GROUP AND THE 5TH SEMESTER ENGLISH STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC WRITING IN WRITING III COURSE OF FKIP SRIWIJAYA UNIVERSITY

Abstract: This study was conducted in order to find out the correlation between the use of Facebook group and the academic writing of 5th semester student of the English Education Study Program, FKIP Unsri, taking Writing III course. It also investigated the aspect of writing the students mostly developed, and the students’ perception toward the use of Facebook group in Writing III course. The population was the 5th semester English students of FKIP Sriwijaya University academic year 2013/2014. They were 27 students from class 5B participating as the sample of this study. To collect the data, documentation and questionnaire were used. The students’ academic writing was analyzed based on the rubric, and the questionnaire was analyzed manually by using percentage analysis. To find out the correlation between the use of Facebook group and the students’ academic writing, correlation analysis was utilized. The results of the study showed that there was no significant correlation between the use of Facebook group and the students’ academic writing since r-obtained was lower than r-table (0.15

Second language writing online: An update

I last wrote an overview of developments in second language (L2) online writing 10 years ago (Godwin-Jones, 2008). Since that time, there have been significant developments in this area. There has been renewed interest in L2 writing through the wide use of social media, along with the rising popularity of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and telecollaboration (class-based online exchanges). The recognition of writing as a social act has also led to a significant rise in interest in collaborative writing. This has been aided by the popularity of tools providing a shared writing space, such as Google Docs. The importance and recognition of genre in both student work and writing theory have grown considerably among practitioners and researchers. The increased practice of integrating multimedia into writing is reflected in the popularity of multimodal projects, such as digital storytelling. At the same time, digital tools for evaluating writing have become more widely available in the form of digital annotators and automated writing evaluation (AWE) software, which take advantage of advances in corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). In addition, tools for processing and evaluating large data sets enable approaches from data mining that provide valuable insights into writing processes. The variety and, in some cases, the complexity of online writing environments has increased the need for both learner and teacher training

E-books in academic libraries

This paper provides an analysis of the current state of the art in e-books, and attempts both to set the scene and provide reasons for their low uptake. Publishers, e-book providers and aggregators, academics and intermediaries (i.e., librarians and information specialists) should concentrate on raising awareness of what is available and what are the advantages related to e-books for specific categories of users. At the same time e-book suppliers should make e-books easier to find and purchase