Week 5

Perhaps I am confusing everyone else but I am calling this Week 5 as it is in fact the fifth week of the semester although we had one of them off. So, some of my students will, this week, write a blog and call it week 4 thereby appearing to be a week behind. However, because they actually wrote a blog for week three (the one we had off) they should be labeling their blogs the same as me. I think the confusion is because they wrote one blog to cover weeks 1 and 2 and then started calling their second blog “week 2”. So, it is now week 5 although students have written only 4 blogs – so blog 4 should be labeled “Week 5”. I have written all this in the hope that students will actually read it and start naming their blogs consistently. This week I will be checking for entries for week 5 but if they are not labeled correctly it will appear that they have not been done.

So, what happened this week? Well, for the first lesson of the week we tried a technique of trying to identify the main points in a long text by basically identifying the main points in each section of the text. I provided rather general questions about each of the section, which if they answered, should help them to identify the main ideas. From those I examined more closely, it would appear that if I ask a general question I am destined to get a very general and vague answer. For example one section of the text extended for over nine pages, explaining the potential effects of Internet use on our social interaction. The question prompted students to present some of the possible effects of the Internet on our social interaction and one student’s response was “The Internet might have some negative effects on our social interaction”. So, nine pages has been summarized to this but even that is inaccurate because it fails to acknowledge that the Internet may also have some positive effects on our social interaction. This is just one examples of the responses I got to my questions but it is fairly representative and so I now know that I need to focus on the role of detail, in writing in general, but in summarizing in particular – there seems to be a tendency to put no detail in a summary but rather make general, vague statements that reduce the complex argument of another writer to a redundant statement that is pretty much meaningless.

In the second lesson of the week we did further work on summary writing by recalling what had already been taught/learned and then discussing how applicable that all is to our current situation. Collectively each class had a good grasp of what is involved in writing a good summary and so we now have a fairly sound theoretical basis but in the coming weeks we’ll get to see how well it is put into practice.

Time has just flown by and some students seemed surprised when reminded that their podcasts are due next week. When the task was first assigned one could say, “no need to worry yet as the deadline is the end of October” but surprise, surprise, the end of October is fast approaching. When I first ran this course and had to learn how to host the podcasts on my website the whole process was very time consuming for me. It was a rather steep learning curve. However, this time I am hoping to be well ahead. I am currently working on preparing the host page for each student and will hopefully finish that later today. Then when students submit their podcasts, all I will have to do is place their files in the appropriate folder and ensure that the file is named according to the students own name (as instructed). In my earlier attempts I had to use a laptop with a mere ½ GB of Ram but this time I have one with 2GB and if necessary I even have access to one with 4GB. This is particularly important when dealing with large video files. Despite being told to give their files their own name, I wonder how many files will be submitted called “podcast”. Don’t students realize how unhelpful it is for 60 students to submit homework with generic names like “podcast”, “homework”, “essay” etc. When it comes to grading surely it is obvious that the most important thing an instructor needs to know is who’s work he’s looking at. He already knows it’s a podcast, because it was submitted to the folder called “podcasts” on the day that podcasts were due.