For your mini assignment this week, you worked in pairs (or in a group of three) toward a classroom-wide goal: to create a magazine. This type of learning is called "collaborative learning." Kenneth Bruffee describes collaborative learning as providing a "particular kind of social context for conversation, a particular kind of community--a community of status equals: peers." I want you to respond to this idea of collaborative learning by articulating your experience with it--what did you learn in the process; what worked and what didn't work; why would it be important to be able to learn collaboratively; how does the social context affect your learning?
In your reflections, I want you to also think through the key terms we have been discussing in the last eight weeks--finding connections to this assignment and the learning that took place here. Create a hierarchy of terms and explore connections to each other. Why did you choose the order that you did? What theorists provide the foundation for you to think the way that you do (I EXPECT you to use theorists here--not simply mention that someone else mentioned them).
By this point you know the guidelines. =)
“Providing a particular kind of social context for conversation,” is precisely what this magazine did for the class on Thursday. It certainly did make us a community of status equals, for seventy-five minutes the class came together in order to complete a collaborative project. We all pulled together, and shared the responsibility so that we could all get done on time. No argument with Bruffee on my end. The importance of collaborative learning extends beyond the classroom, it develops the entire person among their peers. We begin to really understand our own strengths as well as the strengths in others, and how it can help us achieve greater things, in more condensed time, than we ever could on our own.
ReplyDeleteThinking back to what we’ve learned so far, this my hierarchy of terms relating to this project. Rhetoric was where it all began when we learned about the five cannons; invention, arrangement, style, and delivery back in Aristotle’s days. Rhetorical Situation was later brought to our attention by Bitzer. These things are used every time we compose, as we know from discussions in class. We used rhetoric when composing our pieces for the magazine while considering an audience of digital natives.
Covino and Jolliffe stress the importance of having a theory of composing, which I feel is important to mention for this project since we all exercised our own theories while composing our pieces for the magazine. From start to finish, we all started with our own unique theories before putting it all together, by the editors, to see exactly what can happen when great ideas come together.
Bolter and Grusin have discussed many different terms that I can relate to this project. Mediation, taking all these different components and putting them together for a digital magazine using a digital medium. I wouldn’t say that remediation could be as easily related, since the content was already about digital components, but I feel it’s an important word to list in the hierarchy none-the-less. Two more terms illustrated by Bolter and Grusin are immediacy, and hypermediacy which coexist in today’s digital media, but our mutually dependent. Immediacy depends on hypermediacy. This was reenforced in the example of web cams, which operate under the logic of immediacy, can be embedded in a hypermediated web site.
We’ve learned from Sommers, Sullivan and Eggleston the importance edting practices, which were used by the three editors for the project. Fleckenstein’s reading stressed the importance of helping students perceive the incoherence in their writing, which also collaborated on our understanding of editing practices.
Finally, reflection. We’ve all learned from Yancey the importance of this. I consider this the final term used in collaboration of this project because it is the last and most essential step in the process of composing. There you have it, all of the terms used in collaboration of this project, as well as an introduction to collaborative learning, I have no doubt that this will not be the last time we see this term.
Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with collaborative learning, a.k.a. group projects. I love it when my group really comes together and we all work well and do our own part to contribute equally to the finished product. I absolutely despise group work when there’s that one lazy jerk (or an entire group of jerks) who can’t seem to understand that if they don’t do their work, the rest of us will have to pick up the slack. In the case of the magazine, I have to give major props to Ally and Alex. As soon as we got together we started bouncing ideas off of each other. We email incessantly on Facebook after class and that led to our article’s basic idea: the dangers of Facebook. We peer-edited and offered advice and critiques through the email thread, as well as during class time when we wrote the article. In this instance, it was definitely a love relationship, as the three of us worked as “status equals,” and, like Jocelyn, I couldn’t argue with Bruffee about collaborative learning.
ReplyDeleteMy hierarchy of terms is similar to Jocelyn’s, though not entire the same. I would definitely start with rhetoric as an umbrella term. After rhetoric, I would have Bitzer’s rhetorical situation and its components of exigence/audience/constraints. After that, I’d have Covino and Jolliffe’s theory of composing followed by Sommers’, Fleckenstein’s, Sullivan’s and Eggleston’s ideas of editing. All of these share an infinite amount of connecting and intertwining threads. As EWMers, we use them, and will always use them, in everything we do every day of our careers.
I think this order is the most relevant for these terms since this is usually how writing comes about. We recognize what we feel needs to be changed (or written about), we identify those whom we wish to address, compose our piece of writing, then edit and publish. Voila!
I agree with Jocelyn that Covino and Jolliffe’s assertion of a theory of composing is extremely relevant to this mini assignment, since we all need to work on pieces (whether text, image, or a combination of the two) that would form one cohesive product.
I also think the theories of editing which we read (Sommers, Fleckenstein, Sullivan and Eggleston) are also applicable to our magazine, at least to my group’s part of it. Not only did we send our article to the editors at the end, we also passed each other’s pieces of the work around the table so that we could have two more pairs of eyes pick through our writing to find anything we should change.
I also think Russell and Yan(^~)ez’s idea of genre systems is important to this project. We’ve already seen how troublesome an article can be when the genre isn’t taken in to consideration (the American Dream turned into and American nightmare).As groups and individuals, we worked toward the goal of creating a magazine which we knew would be placed in the public sphere. It is my opinion that we did a kick-ass job. GO TEAM!
I had a great time working on the feature article for the Born Digital magazine. We almost immediately agreed upon a topic for the feature and the different things we knew we wanted to discuss within that topic. It was actually pretty ironic that our whole magazine was about digital technology and our group’s main form of communication was via Facebook message.
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons it’s important to learn to work in groups is because it’s pretty much guaranteed that no matter what career path we go down, we will have to work with our co-workers on projects. It’s important to know how to work with other people and get things done on time. For this particular assignment, it’s for grade. In the future it could be for much more.
Once we figured out what our main topic was the three of us had to determine who the audience was so we could adequately determine what style we wanted to use. Graves says that “style is a way of finding and explaining what is true. Its purpose is not to impress but express.” It was very important that our style of writing matched our target audience in order for the feature to be interesting. We decided that we wanted our audience to be “older” Digital Natives—aka college students.
With our audience determined the writing came pretty easily. We divided the article by topics: I had the introduction, Alex had the Facebook Stalker topic and Michael had Social Media & Future Careers topic. Once our sections were written we all did some quick revisions to each of our sections by passing around our computers. Britton, Burgess & Rohman more or less define revisions as “error correction within a linear mode—prewriting, writing and post-writing.” Considering our time restraints when writing the article we only did the revisions post-writing and very quickly at that.
Our next step in the process was the hardest part: making all of our sections flow together—or “the ‘sticking’ together of text to make logical sequences.” (Watts). While all three of us are great writers and wrote our sections really well—we don’t all write the same way. There was no way we could just cut and paste our sections together and call it a day. We had to do a little bit of work on transitions and things so that it wasn’t completely noticeable that there were three different writers for the feature.
Group projects can be really painful, especially when you get stuck with a group of lazy losers. Unless you have smart, hardworking people to work with, “collaborative learning” is annoying and less than productive, like Michael mentioned. In the assignment we did this week, I was lucky to have a good group. Allie, Michael and I communicated through Facebook messaging to figure out an angle for our feature story. This worked well because we could see everyone’s messages and respond whenever we got a chance. We each contributed ideas and worked from each other’s suggestions. We really didn’t come across anything that didn’t work because we had a solid plan from the beginning of the project.
ReplyDeleteI think collaborative learning, when you have a good group, is good because you develop and explore ideas more than you might if you were coming up with something on your own. A bunch of good ideas is better than just one. Even though I don’t like working in groups with careless members, I do think there is a lesson to be learned in that situation. Unfortunately, not everyone has the same work ethic or style of composing/working, but a lot of times jobs involve working with others. It’s important to know how to work with people- no matter what they are like. So, collaborative learning can be practice for the future. I think social context and our peers are important in the EWM program because many of us hope to work for publications, which means we will be interacting with people and society a lot.
As far as a hierarchy of terms, I would begin with rhetorical situation. Bitzer’s outline of exigence, audience, and constraints is easy to follow and ensures for an organized and effective composition. After that, I think of Bolter and Grusin talking about remediation. Once the main content and structure of a composition is done, you have to think about how you want to present it. Do you want to use an old medium, like a text pamphlet, or a new one, like a PowerPoint presentation? This also makes me think of Aristotle’s five canons of rhetoric, but specifically style. Style is how you get to your audience- it’s how you get to them enough to actually persuade them.
After content, mediation/remediation, and style have been solidified, it’s time for editing and revision. This makes me think about the various readings we had on the topic, especially Fleckenstein and Sommers giving so much thought to the most productive styles of editing for a class. If the revision is not for a class, though, I think the “Before you begin” (Sullivan and Eggleston) reading assignment is the best resource we have had so far. It’s concise while giving good advice and information about editing. It is also easy to follow, and I like that they included the sheets with symbols editors use.
I think reflection is the last step. In this class, our reflections after projects always help me when I’m working on the next project. I think about what I wrote that I did like about my project, to do again, and what I didn’t like, which I’ll work on. Jocelyn said this would be her last step too. I think this is because even though you’re working on a composition for a while and you know your piece inside and out by the end, when you look at the end product you really see what you as a composer can do. Reflection helps you learn from your mistakes and strengthen your best composer qualities.
Both Alex and Michael seem to have the same mercurial relationship with “collaborative learning” that I too share. Working with groups can be entirely a chore or they can be a walk in the park. It all depends on a few factors: group members, workload, and difficulty of the task. Luckily for the diverse minds of our WEPO class, we share a desire for similar interests and the group members were picked by strengths by our insightful instructor, so we could easily dismiss the demands of working with a bunch of slackers.
ReplyDeleteThe workload and the difficulty of the task, however, were something that made our group project a bit more entertaining. We had to complete a portion of a publication that had to be completed and edited within the time constraint, whether it happened that way or not. Specifically, however, the task of creating ads for the publication was not all that simple due to the time constraints. Ashley and I worked together, but at the same time we worked separately. We collaborated on ideas for ads and places to get ad material as to not overlap, but the actual creation of each ad was an individual effort until we finished and then collaborated again on opinions of each other’s ads.
When the time constraints came into play, however, we really had to get working. I spent at least twenty minutes on Gimp properly cutting out the picture of the iPad so it could be superimposed on a background without leaving any of the traces of white from the original file. On top of that, I also spent time figuring out what background and fonts would best fit in the ad for the iPad. When we finally realized what time it was, Ashley and I only had a fraction of the time left to create five more ads, as we had both only worked on one. However, all in all, it was a learning experience and well worth every moment.
To create my hierarchy of keywords, I have to look at the ones that I have always thought most important. I find myself returning to situation, style, ideology, and process. Still, the former three terms tie into the meaning and conclusion in the third. As I have stated before, he system of a process is to “create meaningful relationships among the ideas presented within the writer’s text” (Gorrell). This theory came from the situation, the writer’s style and the ideological influences of the writer.
I like to think of process as the entire array of strategies in composition that tie in important pieces that may be neglected as their own sources. Covino and Jolliffe state that process impacts rhetoric “as a method of writing instruction that relied heavily upon invention strategies,” also tying into invention.
Berlin gives much insight into the impact and significance of ideologies. He asserts “rhetoric can never be innocent of ideology.” This buttress that every written and spoken word or expression of information within rhetoric is impacted, influenced, and shaped by personal, societal, cultural, and political bias.
Situation is key. Bitzer presents that the rhetorical situation finds a clearer audience with exigence. Considering the presence of the situation and happenings around an opportunity of discourse, as well as the audience, the most appealing discourse possible is created.
Style is also increasingly important. Gibson gives us the idea that style is how writers “present to us a self.” Weathers states a theory that differs from other theorists in terms of style. He presents that “teachers should ‘say that style is the proof of a human beings individuality.” Style goes into the depths of a person’s individual method, which is almost irrefutably influenced by their ideology.
So, my hierarchy of key terms goes as follows: process, ideology, situation, and style. Regardless of the hierarchy, however, key terms are extremely important and not a day goes by where my theory of composition does not change according to the impact of the terms on my writing.
I have to agree with Michael when he says that he has a love-hate relationship with collaborative learning. At its best, all members of the group put forward their best effort and the extra ideas bounced off of one another hone and perfect my own and my group members’ work. However, at its worst there is one person who ends up doing all of the work (and somehow, as a certified pushover, that person always seems to be me). Regardless, it is important to learn how to function in both scenarios because in the “real world” we will most likely be working collaboratively (especially in the writing field) in some way more often than not.
ReplyDeleteIn the magazine assignment I think that our class worked very well together. While I only worked closely with my own partner, it appears based on our finished product that most people pulled their weight and contributed a lot of creativity and hard work to the project. I enjoyed doing this assignment and hope we do another one like it in the course of the semester.
I agree with everyone else’s hierarchy of terms so far… so for the sake of creativity I am going to relate mine specifically to this project. In order of importance from greatest to least my hierarchy of terms is: editing and revision, genre, and theory of composition. For this particular assignment, I think that Sommers, Sullivan and Eggleston’s editing was the most important key word for us. Since we were put into groups and we all contributed parts of the complete piece, we needed to know how to properly edit each other’s work in order to create a polished finished product. We implemented Sommers, Sullivan and Eggleston’s idea that editing went above and beyond simply checking for grammar mistakes. The main editors needed to know how to direct us from the very beginning of the class period, and without sufficient leadership on their part our magazine would have been discombobulated. Revision was also key to this assignment since in my group Autumn and I put together rough drafts, revised them and then meshed them together. Russell and Yanez’s genre was of next importance. Since we were working in the genre of a magazine our writing needed to fit the stipulations of that medium. Our individual assignments also had specific genre guidelines and if we had not followed them, the whole flow of the magazine would have been affected. Finally, Conivo and Joliffe’s theory of composing was vital because we each had to effectively put into practice our own theories in completing this assignment. Even though our ultimate goal was to create a magazine, in order to get the most out of the assignment, as Pianko says, needed to not simply be product-oriented, content-conscious, but process-oriented and holistic.
I wish I could have incorporated every key term into this hierarchy... but for the most part I feel that these three were the most vital to this assignment.
The mini Assignment day was interesting to say the least. To coordinate and execute what our class did in the amount of time we were given was necessarily the ideal working environment, but somehow everyone pulled together and turned into a smooth, working machine as each group cranked out one finished product after the other.
ReplyDeleteAs the Editor in Chief of our magazine project, I knew that the time constraint was going to be a difficult thing to manage, so the first thing I, along with my Production Editor (Jenna) and Assistant Editor (Janice) worked out was a schedule for when everything needed to be in by, including check-ins with the editors, and wrapping up the final work. I’d like to say that everything went swimmingly and that we had enough time to spare, but I find that more often than not, these things do not always work out according to plan. Not trying to sound pretentious, but I agree with Sammi when she said that “without sufficient leadership [from the main editor’s the] magazine would have been discombobulated.” We knew that structure was key in a project like this, and had to focus on that above everything else. Luckily, if I can even say that, our internet decided to halt all progress at the end of class and I was able to format the finished product later that night. And good thing too, because it definitely took longer than the 15 minutes we had allotted ourselves to reconstruct the final piece.
So, what does one say when looking back on the whole process? Well, first of all, I can definitely see where Bitzer’s rhetorical situation came into play; more specifically, I can see where his emphasis on exigence, audience, and constraints came into play as my hierarchy of terms focuses on situation, audience, and style. While I’m not sure Bitzer had “time” constraints in mind when he came up with his theory on rhetorical situation, it definitely stuck out to main as a main clause. Writing towards the audience, or in my case formatting the magazine to fit towards a broad genre of people, was not a difficult task. Luckily, Janice came up with the idea of using a newsletter template that ended up working wonderfully for the magazine.
I also saw a heavy importance on Fleckenstein’s theory on editing a composition. In her article, she discussed how she had her students read one sentence, and then try to guess what would come next. While formatting the magazine, I didn’t have time to go through each sentence, but it did help to look to see what I thought should come next, what the reader should expect to see, on the next page. For instance, when inserting the ads, I had to think about what would make the most sense. So, an ad on the iPad fit perfectly after an article on the iPhone or after the Hot Tech section, where they were advertising new products to buy.
I also felt a heavy impact from reading Sommer’s Responding to and Evaluating Student Writing. It was an important factor to note that, as the Editor, I didn’t want to confuse my team of writers. So, as I walked around, I didn’t want to pick through each article with a fine tooth comb (it was unnecessary and we didn’t have time for that). So, instead, I asked each table what they were working on, and tried to steer them in the right direction if I felt they were getting a little off-track. It was important to focus on the main piece as a whole, and not the grammatical issues that trip people up.
My hierarchy of key terms, much like that of DJ’s, has a heavy focus on situation and style, but I also find that as I progress in this class, my ideas of composition and what is important continually changes from day to day and in the end, who knows what I will hold as the most important term to follow. One thing is for sure, audience and context are overwhelming aspects that one must work through and configure for any work of composition.
As far as group projects are concerned, I don’t have the same mixed feelings that Alex, Michael and DJ share. That isn’t to say that I think that they’re all good or all bad, I think that it’s situational. In the example of the magazine that we made in class, I thought it was a perfect group (or pair) project. I appreciated that the groups and pairs were arranged by skill sets, which allowed all of us to maximize our potential and shine under time constraints. While I would usually prefer to work alone, I appreciated having Jessica to bounce ideas off of and vice versa. We had pretty much the same idea for where we wanted to go with our segment of the magazine and ran with it. After playing the dialogue for the comic a bit, she proposed that we have a short paragraph explaining the digital divide, as well as a “how-to” for crossing over into the threshold. We wanted it to be funny, which is a challenge in itself. In that aspect, it was really nice to have an audience in each other before presenting the final product to others.
ReplyDeleteCollaborative learning, especially in this setting (WEPO class), gives us a more “real-world” approach to an education. In working in groups, as people we struggle to find harmony. We don’t want to be too aggressive and make our partners feel that their ideas are unwelcome. On that same token, we must be careful to not be too passive and cheapen our work by being too accommodating. Finding a balance is difficult even with close friends, let alone with people you met a few short months ago. To work with your peers on an assignment forces you to find that happy medium and utilize each person based on their strengths. Once this is achieved, the culmination of ideas and modifications are more meaningful. Not to mention, the comradery is always a plus. It’s great to take personal pride in your work, but to come together and accomplish a common goal as a team is all-the-more gratifying. As Joceyln mentioned in her first paragraph, we were all equals and we pulled it together (especially thanks to the excellence in editing) to create something that was downright good.
In terms of the hierarchy, I share a similar arrangement to my peers. The first questions we asked about the magazine were “what kind of magazine is this? And who is our audience?” In order for us to get started, we needed to know the exigency, audience and constraints. Naturally, atop of the hierarchy of key terms utilized in this project, was the rhetorical situation. Founding father, Bitzer, gave us these factors when evaluating a rhetorical situation and how to use it most effectively. Bolter and Grusin’s approaches to remediation were second in this project. We took an idea and figured out the best vehicle through which to deliver it. After the actual composition of the piece, then began the editing. Sommers, Sullivan and Eggleston’s emphasis on editing stresses the importance of looking past the surface errors and digging deeper into the work to make it better. At this point in our education, we had better know well enough to get the cosmetic blemishes out of our work, but that’s just phase one. I think the fine work by our editors was key in the success in this project.
As many of the posts have already said, collaborative learning is most often a burden felt by those of us who are unable to sit back and do nothing in class. My experience with collaborative learning has been either a complete disaster or a great success. I would have to say that our mini assignment was definitely a success, and I feel that way about a lot of the group work we’ve done in class. Everyone seems really interested in giving/getting good feedback and I think that’s what helps make our projects flow so well.
ReplyDeleteAlicia made a great point that we don’t want to make people feel that their ideas are “unwelcome” and at the same time we don’t want to be too passive and sacrifice the quality of the work that we could accomplish.
For the mini assignment in particular Alicia and I were on the same page right away. It was easy for us to come up with ideas and I think that both of our writing and creative processes blended really well into the topic that we were assigned, Digital Flash. Honestly, I think that the only thing that didn’t work in our favor was the time constraint. It was definitely difficult to finish the task of creating a purely entertaining piece in 30 or 35 minutes. We had to make sure that it would be understood by most digital natives and even try to relate it to readers who aren’t necessarily as familiar with digital technologies. Not to mention that we were creating a comic through a generator, something that neither of us had done before.
I think that these group projects in editing have definitely given us all a taste of what it could be like in our future careers and collaborative skills are definitely ones that we’re all going to need in the workplace.
As far as a hierarchy of terms, mine would have to be very similar to the previous posts. I would say that the foundation for my thought process and for these projects would be based on Bitzer’s idea of the rhetorical situation. We began our project by asking who our target audience was and what we wanted them to take away from reading our piece, and we obviously had to deal with the constraints of our medium and topic. Russell and Yanez’s concept of genre was also an integral part of this assignment. We needed to work within the guidelines of the genre of a magazine because as Sammi said, if we hadn’t “the whole flow of the magazine would have been affected”. I think that Sullivan and Eggleston’s “Before You Begin” also had a great influence on the mini assignment. Even though we didn’t necessarily do a heavy amount of editing text for our section we still needed to target the right audience, and revise and synthesize our ideas into a coherent piece and the article definitely provides an easy to follow process. Lastly, I think that for Alicia and I remediation as defined by Bolter and Grusin was especially important. Our section was an example of us remediating an idea that we took from Palfrey and Gasser’s “Born Digital” into a comic strip. The idea of the digital divide as elaborated in their article was still present in our comic strip, only in a different medium.
"Collaborative learning", as Kenneth Bruffee mentions, establishes a community of status equals. I can go no further than agreeing entirely with this statement. Though I often find it frustrating to depend on others, mostly because of the slight risk of being let down, by socially communicating towards tackling a common objective, as a composer you are finally able to have someone to relate to. Working in groups allows people to interact around a common goal in a “social context”. We are no longer sitting at our desks wondering if we are doing this the right way, we have our peers to communicate ideas with and learn from. At the same time we are critics not only of our peers work, but our own work too. As a composer, it seems that when working with “collaborative learning” as Bruffee suggests, we approach our composing process differently, specifically in the terms of editing and revising our work.
ReplyDeleteBruffee’s theory may seem to apply to working in a community or among your peers, however it does cause you to reconsider or reflect on your composing process and the terms that affect it as a whole. For instance, before considering your composing process, not necessarily as a composer, but as an intellectual, you must acknowledge the rhetorical situation present. Bitzer states that this involves your acknowledgement of an exigency, your form of discourse and your discourse audience. Among the rhetorical situation, the actions a rhetorist employs should be determined by his knowledge of rhetoric in general. As Jocelyn mentions above, though its placement among the hierarchy can be debated, the five cannons of rhetoric and your understanding of each affect how you chose to approach the rhetorical situation present.
From there, we can change our thinking caps from the rhetorist, and look through the eyes of a composer. We have established the exigency and form of discourse, we have applied the five cannons of rhetoric, and we are now ready to approach the composing process. Here is where I believe Bruffee’s theory can affect your approach. Most features of the composing process may remain the same when working with “collaborative learning”, however it is possible that we may approach other features differently knowing there are now two heads at work. Issues such as choosing your audience, style and structure may remain the same, because of the groups common goal, however conflict, or would it be better to say criticism, should be considered in the later stages of the composing process. For example, with regard to editing, the community we work in collaboratively may suggest ideas or changes we never noticed or refused to employ. As a composer it presents an issue where one may want to alter their composing process due to the conditions of working with peers.
ReplyDeleteThough the composing process does involve editing and revision they often come last, after other key terms are approached and dealt with. With regard to the mini-assignment and working among your peers, there is definitely necessity for the role of mediation to be discussed. The objective of the magazine was to incorporate immediacy through text and imagery, while addressing a target audience, however as Bolter and Gruisin present in their text Remediation there is also a demand for hypermediacy throughout the project. It could be said a magazine is hard copy of hypermediacy, incorporating many different texts, images and related subjects, in one collection. I believe that, among this hierarchy of key terms we have discussed, mediation, immediacy and hypermediacy definitely fit however I question myself as to where. Could they be considered part of our composing process? Where? Is it among the structure or style we choose? I find the issue puzzling yet important.
This project did act as a type of collaborative leaning. We had to work together in groups toward a common goal of making an impressive piece of writing. Each group had its own task, its own part of the whole, without which the whole could not function or be complete. For the class period the community of students, of which I am a part, were made into a band of equals. We were all equally involved in the creation of a piece of digital work. It was unspoken but in everyone’s mind that there part must be completed and it must be completed on time or everyone would be disadvantaged. So we all dedicated ourselves to the completion of our magazine articles. While working with my partner and the other students in the class I found a new appreciation for timeliness and the completion of background work. We all needed to have it completed by certain time so that the articles, or whatever each group was contributing could be sent to the editors with enough time for them to be evaluated and fixed before the final project needed to be submitted. So I relearned the importance of time management concerning group assignments. After all in group assignments when you are working with your peers your procrastination with affect more than your own grade. I also really learned to appreciate the before work. We had been told to read the article before class and to start planning so that we would be able to finish on time. Even though the article wasn’t very long we really did need to read, contemplate, absorb, and mull over the meaning of the article and the article we had to write. If we had not done the homework we would never have been able to finish on time.
ReplyDeleteFor my group mate Sammi and I we worked in class the day we were assigned the project to figure out an idea of what we wanted to write about. Later the next day we emailed each other discussing the idea of reading the article and then each of us writing a rough draft that we could combine together for the final project. This method seemed to work really well.
It’s important to learn to work collaboratively with other people because when you get out into the “real world” and get a job it’s highly likely, an almost certainty in fact that you will have to work with the people in your department to do some kind of project. Learning the skills now of how to divide up the work and move into different groups with different types of people will help us in this endeavor.
Working in groups has always helped me to learn better. Having someone there you can bounce ideas off of and give you new perspectives on things is really helpful. Well it is if your group members are actually participating. I think that collaborative learning can be helpful in learning about something.
In reference to key words I guess at the top would be rhetoric. It is the usage of language to communicate. We use language to communicate all the time and we used it in this project to communicate our ideas of digital technology in each of our articles. The next couple key words in my hierarchy are written about by Bitzer. He wrote about quite a few key words but the ones most important to me are audience and constraints. When presenting an idea or theory on anything you need to keep the audience in mind. You need to make sure you stay on track the entire time so that it’s a work that will attract and keep your target audiences attention like the magazine we wrote. The constraints are the things that keep people from solving a problem but in the context of something written its what keeps the audience from agreeing with what is written. The next on my list is the Theory of Composing which was written about by Covino and Jollife. The theory of composing is essential to anything we write because everyone has their own and for this project we had to mesh theories of composing with our group members. Another key word to keep in mind is genre. When composing something you have to remember the genre you are composing in and the rules of that genre. For the collaborative project we had to make sure that we kept the fact that it was a magazine article at the forefront of our minds. Then there are the editing key words which were written about by Eggleston. Sommers, and Sullivan. They all wrote about how you should edit and the tools you use to edit. These were important because we did preliminary editing to our pieces while writing them but then we also sent them to the editing group who made sure that our articles were coherent and cohesive.
ReplyDeleteIn agreement with Jocelyn the last key term should be reflection by Yancey. It’s the last step in the composition process. It’s when we look back on our work and contemplate the process we went through. It’s when we think of what we did and what we could have done to make it better. Then what we can do next time to make it better and it’s connected to the magazine project because this is the reflection for that project.
It’s not surprising that pretty much everyone has the same opinion on collaborative learning: it’s all about your group. The only way for learning to be “collaborative” at all, you’ve got to have at least two people who are eager and willing to participate (hence the word ‘group’). Collaboration involves discourse as individual acts of cognition as well as social activity. For the mini-assignment to be completed, everyone had to come up with their own ideas about their individual sections. Even all the editors has separate jobs to do within our main task of pulling everyone and everything together. Alex and Michael (and everyone else) couldn’t stop talking about how well their group worked together. As the editor who had to go through everything line-by-line, I have to say that their awesome collaboration produced high quality work. Thanks to their peer-editing, there were very few changes that needed to be made. In this particular case, peer learning was a great success. We all learned a lot about editing and the process of making a mini-magazine, just by watching others and trying to make their work better.
ReplyDeleteRhetoric/rhetorical situation: obviously, rhetoric and the rhetorical situation are largely important. The reason we study rhetoric is to communicate ideas effectively. The study of composition and all of its components falls underneath the huge realm that is rhetoric. Bitzer’s work is vital here, but for the sake of avoiding repetition, I’m not going to go into that…
Process: because this was my key word, I feel especially loyal to maintaining the argument that your product is only as good as your process. I read an article by Maxine Hairston the approaches writing as a creative process, not something that conforms to a structure. The structure is something that forms as ideas come together, and follow one another to make meaning. Sure, a coherent piece of writing has a beginning and end, you put your evidence in the middle… most of the time. But the point that Hairston makes is that each composition process is individual. It is dependent on the context, the audience, your available tools, and expression. Revision serves as a tool for improving upon, or creating further what you already have. The point is not to make your writing conform to a set of rules, but to write in a way that they fall into place according to your purpose. The composition process is non-linear, and can be approached in an infinite number of ways. The important thing about our mini project is that all of our individual processes came together for the same one purpose.
Audience: one of the most important concepts in composition, writing, and rhetoric. The purpose of any kind of communication is to reach an audience. Knowing your audience is a huge part of composition, so you can reach them effectively. Audience controls the language you use, the structure or genre of your work, even the content itself. Yancey points out the fact that assimilating to the audience can often be the most difficult challenge we face as composers. The audience always has the potential to change (and also to do the changing!), and the author must always be aware of the state of his audience and the constraints held by it.
Coherence: not a term we’ve necessarily discussed in great detail, but it’s mentioned in our Key Concepts article, and it’s obviously important. The “coherence” of a piece can be read in many ways. Correct grammar and word usage obviously come into play here. And so, this is perhaps the category we’d find most dedicated to what we’ve come to know as editing. The point of editing is to make a piece as coherent as possible. This includes spelling, grammar, and punctuation; however, it also extends to include structure (of the sentence and work as a whole). For a work to be coherent, it has to “flow.” Recently, we’ve had to do quite a bit of editing, and I’ve really come to see that one person’s idea of “coherent” can be reeeaaalllllyy different from mine.
The major benefit to collaborative learning is that each group member helps fill in the understanding gap of the others. This project in particular we each had a unique perspective to offer, by combining them all together we were able to create a fun, informative magazine. It was a lot of fun to be able to do such a different project. Working on the ads in particular was an awesome experience; it was difficult to avoid getting distracted by the plethora of cool gadgets and focus enough to put them into ad format. I think the hardest part about working as a collaborative unit is blending two peoples’ styles and making it a cohesive whole. The ads were a little easier because there weren’t any long writing sections involved. However, there is still a noticeable difference between the format of mine and DJ’s ads. Another drawback is people in the group not contributing to the finished product; luckily that was not the case in my group. Thank you DJ!
ReplyDeleteI agree wholeheartedly with Zack when he mentions his fear of being let down when depending on others in a group. It is something I have been familiar with in group work in the past; however this class has shown me that that is not always the case. When you are in a group of like-minded people who actually enjoy the work at hand there is no pressure to carry the whole group in order to make it all happen.
I think the most important terms to keep in mind for this project are situation and editing. The rhetorical situation of both the magazine and the group work played a huge role in the overall product. Writing within the magazine genre constraints, as well as keeping in mind the digital native audience ensured that we had freedom with our topics but still effectively presented our features. Editing was a huge aspect because the editors were responsible for not just looking over mechanical errors but also putting the whole thing together into a cohesive whole. There was a lot of work involved; I can easily say their job was probably the most difficult.
Sullivan and Eggleston talked about the different levels of editing, but according to their hierarchy there is none that fully encompasses what our magazine chief editor had to do. The closest description would be that of a copyeditor; proofreading, improving phrasing, and working out the organization.
Another theorists ideas that I found relevant during this project was Russell and Yanez’s model of context as a network where ideas and revisions are shared within a group. That’s exactly what our class did.
I’m extremely excited to hear responses to our magazine from those who weren’t a part of the creation process.
In my opinion I think that “collaborative learning” can definitely have its pluses and minuses, but overall I find that it can be mostly beneficial. I’ll start out with the negatives since I was once told in a psychology class that it was best to end on a positive note. Like Michael and Alex mentioned in previous posts, “collaborative learning” can be completely unsuccessful if all the members of the group aren’t equally participating and contributing. This then leaves all the slack left for the participants of the group that actually put effort into doing their work. Another downside to collaborative learning is the fact that it very well may be a possibility that not everyone in the group will agree on a particular way to approach the assignment. Even if everyone does equally approach the assignment, one or more people may have not completely grasped the overall concept, which then sometimes makes it more difficult then having to do all the work on your own. If you don’t work well with others, and can’t take any constructive criticism, then collaborative learning may be difficult for you.
ReplyDeleteOn a positive note, if you have a good group of collaborators this idea can go a long way. The group as a whole can benefit by having each member putting their input and ideas. Having more than one opinion gives a more diverse point of view, which makes it more relatable to your audience. I definitely found that this particular mini project benefited from collaborative learning because it brought this diversity. It may have required the editors to work a little bit harder, or not in their preferred way, but I think that it was successful in the end. Because of the time issue at hand, it was extremely successful to have different tasks delegated out to different people. Otherwise, I truthfully don’t believe it would have been completed in time. Personally the collaboration of my partner and I worked out in our favor. We both had similar ideas but the combination of us working made things more efficient, and make the presentation more effective.
As far as the hierarchy of words the first thing that comes to mind is Aristotle’s five canons of rhetoric which are invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Once we received the assignment and we had the opportunity to research to it at home we were able to invent some ideas of how we wanted to approach the assignment. Then once we were in class and collaborated our ideas we invented our part and arranged them in the most affective manner. The style is what made the assignment appear interesting and eye catching. Memory may have not had a specific role, but if you use it in the sense of using your memory to reflect back on previous assignments that may have worked in the past it could help develop your assignment more effectively. The editors played a huge role in delivery and how the overall assignment was presented.
I also think Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, exigence, audience, and constraints. Audience played an important role in making this assignment successful. This helped me choose which areas to concentrate on considering what would be most appealing to my audience.
I would say my hierarchy would go accordingly… rhetorical situation, audience, and then the five canons of rhetoric to help shape the assignment in the best way possible.
The magazine collaboration we did in class helped a lot as far as understanding what it takes to put one together as well as my classes work ethic and talent. But, like Michael, I definitely have a love-hate relationship with group projects, and this one in particular.
ReplyDeleteThe time period we had was too short in my opinion. As an editor it took a lot of time to gather everyone’s documents and put them together on just one computer. Some documents we had to reformat and whatnot because I have a Mac and other students have PCs. I think the groupings helped a lot though. It seemed like we were strategically placed within groups with certain roles that fit our interests and skills.
It is important to be able to learn collaboratively because it shows that you know how to work with other people and be on a team. That is a useful skill once we as college graduates enter the workforce in whom you must be able to cooperate and lead members of your staff. In my situation this assignment worked greatly in my favor because I actually want to be a magazine editor and I got to play one and see how it is first hand. I was aware of the responsibilities of editors but I hadn’t really envisioned all the technicalities that are also a part of the job.
The social context affected my learning because it was simply a different atmosphere. So far all projects have been individual, so it was different to have to depend on other people and give them deadlines and direction.
Of course I’m going to start off with Rhetoric and Bitzer. How could I ever forget it now? It definitely started this class off with a BANG, considering that I had never taken the Rhetoric course, much less heard the term before. But now I know that rhetoric is basically the heart of a piece. Without it, you have no way of bringing your piece to life, therefore failing to reach your audience. This became evident within the magazine project because we were striving to reach a particular audience by combining our knowledge of rhetoric.
Covino and Jolliffe are great advocates of theories when it comes to composition. This tied into our project because we all have our own composition theories and exercised them together for the sake of getting this project done successfully.
Mediation, a term brought to you by Bolter and Grusin is especially relevant to this project because we (editors) combined the different sections of the magazine and re-molded them into one final digital medium.
Sommers, Sullivan and Eggleston stressed editing and its importance, which myself and the other two editors saw firsthand. It really is no joke.
Last but definitely not least, reflection by Yancey. This is the last term, because it is the aftermath and a greatly important part of the learning process in composing. Now reflecting on this project, I must say it deepened my love for editing within the magazine genre. It was hard work but it was a great learning experience, fun, and something that I consider doing for the rest of my life.
As Alex, Michael, and DJ mentioned, working in groups can be a daunting tasks. I like the ability to know that I have control over what I do and don’t do, but at the same time, I am aware that “collaborative learning” does have its perks. I found it easy to work with my partner because we both understood what was to be expected of us for the table of contents section. As soon as we got together, we immediately began the “social context for conversation” by discussing the type of genre we would be working in and what was expected for a table of contents. There really was no need for us to get together, or discuss outside of class since we decided that we would wait for class on Thursday to figure out what everyone was calling their sections and a blurb on them. Come class, I think we did a good job, considering we did get the blurb page a bit late, but we still managed to pull it off. We also worked together to find the right colors and pictures, as well as designs (which we looked up examples for) to make the page come together. I suppose we should have passed around the blurb page a bit earlier just so that we would not have to have been rushing the last few minutes of class, but it still managed to work out. I think it is important to learn to work collaboratively, especially in a publishing/editing environment like the one we mocked on Thursday, because there are certain jobs that will be too much for one person to handle, or there are environments that require you to work and depend on others to make a certain project complete. I think the mini assignment definitely modeled this very well and helped to see the importance of learning collaboratively (especially that we didn’t get to pick our own groups). I believe the social context affects learning because you have to make sure that you take note of other people’s ideas and sort of think of the best way you can combine them to make sure it not only completes the task but also comprises for everyone’s ideas.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the hierarchy of terms, I think it would be best to start with rhetoric, as described by Bitzer, because he describes the process of exigence, audience and constraints, although I would focus primarily on the latter two. Audience and constraints were definitely important in creating this magazine because we were constrained to a specific genre and an audience. By audience, we also had to make sure we were targeting the “digital natives” and that we kept it specific for them.
After that, I’d say I would go with editing and revision. I particularly liked the piece that Sullivan and Eggleston wrote on these terms because it showed that there is more to editing and revising than just fixing the surface errors. This step was crucial to our assignment because although it was important for us to make sure there were no errors, it was also important for us to revise the piece in order to make it appropriate for the audience and genre.
Lastly, I’d say I would go with circulation. Trimbur (even though we didn’t actually read this in class) talked a lot about circulation and the process it undergoes, and I think this assignment would be a perfect example. We dealt with all the production aspects individually, and the editor’s job was to make sure it was exhibited, but the circulation of the actual magazine will be the last step, in my opinion, to complete the process.
I really enjoyed the Mini-assignment day. I may be a bit biased, because my goal is to work in the magazine industry as either an editor or a feature writer, but this project was very exciting for me. Working with Zack was nice too, because we agreed on everything we needed to do. We were able to collaborate in a way that did not criticize either of our ideas. We both expressed ideas and thoughts and were able to use them in such a way that created the masterpiece of our finished product.
ReplyDeleteWe definitely had to understand the readings and assignments thus far. Especially Yancey, because after being assigned the project on Tuesday, our thoughts began to wander until the actual assignment day Thursday. We had to reflect on our ideas, but not make them effective quite yet.
One of the major concepts that were portrayed in our assignment was the concept of mediation. The whole idea of the magazine itself is mediation. The magazine being put together by numerous students in the class with all different ideas constitutes Bolter and Grusin’s ideas of what mediation is. The tricky part of our mediation, and one that must have been stressful most for the editors was the unpredictability. Mediations always carry a significant amount of this; however, with many small groups working on very important pieces in the magazine, the success depended on everyone.
This is where I liked the atmosphere of the project. You could tell walking into our classroom that there was a significant amount of work being done. Each group had a specific assignment, and they were meant to follow it in their own way, but still remain on the same wavelength.
We took a different approach on our assignment. We wanted to give a quick blurb about each new item in technology that we chose, and beyond that we split the items equally. I feel like we collaborated well because not only was the split even, but we tried to base the “girly-ness” off of which item I would receive, and the “boy-ness” off what he would receive. I thought the project as a whole went very well and even further, that the class did an amazing job of pulling together such a great product in such a short time.