Thoughts on feedback

The assignment for today was: "Select a couple of sentences or short passages from different postings to focus our discussion. Print them out and bring them with you, or be prepared to identify them very quickly (by work, poster, and date and time) so I can put them up on the screen for discussion." We'll get to that. First, this:

Since Monday, I've received the anonymous feedback from the first term questionnaire. I've not yet had a chance to reformat the responses so that everyone can read them (much less read through them myself), but one thing that struck me at a first glance was a split in the responses to the question about the way the course uses writing ("Making the writing of students a central focus of the course rather than primarily a means of evaluation"). Many people -- most, it seems -- are apparently very positive about it, but a number make a point which I want to consider seriously. Some quick quotes: "the lack of evaluation really takes any pressure off the writing," "we . . . receive no helpful feedback from the professor," "I find all of the writing we have been doing trivial."

The reason I want to take them seriously is that in fact I had already been struck by the variability in the seriousness with which writing (and discussion) has been taken, and wondered about whether there were a way to address this. My view (as you know) is that the way we learn to use language is by using it in situations where it is taken seriously for what it says rather than in practice exercises. But I also know that for many people the dependence on approval and evaluation, and explicit feedback, is very important. The context in which we work -- the university -- makes it harder to take a short assignment that won't get a grade as seriously as the research paper for another course. As one respondent said, "Regardless of how interesting the material is, on a tight deadline, I'm sure that most students would prioritize something that's evaluated over something that isn't."

While I believe very firmly (as I've said) that marking papers to average them out for a grade makes no sense (even though it's a nearly universal practice), and so I can't see myself awarding grades to writing and then averaging them out for a course grade, I do think that it makes sense to put some pressure on all of us to create, at least on occasion, some more extended, thoughtful, and formally correct pieces of writing, and get some feedback on them as pieces of serious academic writing.

So here's what I propose. We've spent a significant amount of time reading in and about Jonathan Swift, and discussing his work in class (we've also spent some time on the larger context in which he was working).  Let's find a way to get closure through some serious writing. Not a term paper, but a thoughtful piece making a point about, or arguing an issue connected with, or offering an interpretation of, the work of the Dean. Between now and a week from now, your assignment is to write a short position paper on Swift. You've learned something about him; think of the paper as your take on Swift. It should be at least a few pages, no more than five or six*, and should include references -- to Swift's work, to works about it, to the work of other students in the class. As I've said, some of what I see as a goal of my upper level English courses is to help people become comfortable with the language and forms of scholarship.

So what you need to do is to decide what it is you want to say, or argue, or explain, about Swift's work, and create a document which says that as persuasively as you can. How decide on something you have to say about Swift? Go back over what you've already written, look at what others have written, think about questions you might ask (and answer, or at least explore). You don't need to "do research" for this, though my guess is that there are some questions or issues which might profit from a bit of online prowling, or standing in the stacks.

I'd like to structure this so that it affords as much learning as possible. To do that, here's an additional wrinkle: you need to have a draft ready for others to read by next Monday's class (that deadline in itself should help you keep the paper short and efficient). On Monday I'll set up some structures for providing feedback, and the papers can be edited between then and Wednesday.

We'll do this via wiki pages -- because that allows people to edit, while facilitating ease of reading. It will work this way: there's a wiki called "Writing about Swift" on the Moodle site. There is a list of names; if you click on the question mark after your name it will open a separate wiki page where you can post your text. As usual with a wiki it's editable (unlike forum postings), and there's a "history" tab which allows you to go back and recover changes you (or someone else) made in the past.

A note on editing: although I find it difficult to work in the Moodle editor on text I'm actually composing, what I do (and what I recommend) is that you write in whatever word processor you're comfortable with, and then paste the text into the Moodle editor for fine tuning. It is sometimes the case that Moodle doesn't accept the import cleanly; if you find it's messing things up, an alternative is to save the text, copy and paste it into WordPad, and then copy that (which will be pretty much clean text) and paste it into the Moodle editing window.

On Monday, we'll see what we have, and I'll structure a feedback process.

Today, let's do a quick round to see what people found that they think worth considering or attending to. We might find some issues that you might like to write about.

*Okay: at about 250 words per double spaced 12-point Courier page, if we used them, that's a bit over 1000 words.