Best content in Community 2.0/DFL 2.0

It is not so difficult to use technology to deliver instruction, but a bit challenging to use it to teach a concept.
- Priscilla Stadler on 29 Jan 13
  
  Yellow = faculty learning Pink = examples of connecting students
  
  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Yellow = faculty learning Pink = examples of connecting students</div>
  
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The benefits for students were anecdotal but nonetheless strong from the very first time I connected a composition class with another composition class—I believe the very first was my ENG 101 with an ENG 099 Ximena was teaching. Students saw the process of offering feedback to another set of students, people who were not in the class, as an authentic, meaningful experience serving real needs. Peer review within the classroom could not compare to connecting with another person whose blog and personalization of it revealed a character yet unexplored. There was no mystery in looking at a classmate’s paper any more than there was in their looking at their own—they were all hoops to jump through set by the professor. For reasons I do not pretend to fully understand, the same text posted somewhere as a blog entry produces different reactions. Maybe we (or the students’ generation for certain) live in an era where such online identities are real identities—it is of little importance for my exploration. What did matter was that in that interaction students produced feedback far better, in quality and quantity, than they did in the confines of the single traditional classroom.
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One semester I taught a particularly unruly liberal arts cluster using blogger and these kinds of interactions. There were many moans and groans which frequently had me question whether the class was indeed benefitting in a way worth all the trouble; a couple of semesters later, I had two of the same students in my ENG 102 class. Because it was a Fall II class and I wanted the short session to be different anyway, I conducted that class with no 2.0 tools. At the end of the first week, one of the students from the previous semester came to my office and asked “what happened to the blogs.” I responded that given the complaints, I would have thought nobody missed them. His response pointed to an aspect I had never even considered. He told me that when he wrote in the blog and he knew that others would read it and respond to it, he never felt like it was a lonely homework endeavor in which he was engaged. Thus began my own shift in focus.
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Students have gotten back their essays and I've asked them, while preparing for their final reflection in-class essay, to decide what they think are the two best paragraphs in their NYC neighborhoods papers; we'll have an extra credit session in my office next week to turn the submissions from participants into a map of paragraphs. 
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We discussed how our platforms were an integral part of the activities and contributed to the learning process (of both the students and instructors). Bass and Elmendorf suggest that at the heart of their theory of "social pedagogies" is the development of "authentic tasks," which allow for the "representation of knowledge for an authentic audience" and contributes to the "construction of knowledge in a course" (2). We found that our activities necessitated the creation of an authentic audience, which is crucial for the process of peer and individual learning. There were several challenges that we faced such as timely responses/feedback, lack of participation/promoting discussion, and lack of in-depth responses. The solution is to assign cross-section pairings and use platforms that facilitate interactivity collaboration, and accountability.
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What was interesting is that I have had to repeatedly remind students that, after they uploaded their videos, the task was to compare and contrast and comment on others’ videos.  Students seemed reluctant to do this.  I couldn’t understand if this had to do with the perception that they were “critiquing” each other’s videos (because that was not the assignment) or not.  They were to reflect on the videos and see what connected their community to other communities. 
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As I've written in greater detail my previous post ("Update, May 27), here are some things I'd do differently next semester: 1) provide my students more guidance and practice with peer review; 2) start connecting earlier in the term; 3) use Google Drive to supplement Facebook. This semester has been a surprisingly enjoyable rough draft
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If I had the chance to do this activity over, I'd spend some time at the beginning of class to model feedback
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When I first told my students that another class would be reading their essays and commenting, it quickened stragglers' resolve to finish (already!) setting up their blogs.
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