Dr. Keith Geekie Dr. James McWard Johnson County Community College Overland Park, KS

1. Writing Inside an Online Loop: Discussing, Synthesizing, and Authoring in the College Literature Class Dr. Keith Geekie Dr. James McWard Johnson County Community College Overland Park, KS

2. Inquiry: The Meaningful Uses of the Online Discussion Board • How can instructors design a discussion board so that it becomes an integral part of the overall course and not just an element? • What characterizes literary conversation in an online course?

3. Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation • Online discussions can achieve all three higher level goals, but only if students see the discussion postings as something more than busy work. • Making the discussions a larger part of an online class is a step toward overcoming the “busy work” challenge. • Solution: Working the discussion postings into other assignments in the course enables students to understand the important role they play in the course.

4. Enhancing the Discussions • Enables students to take the discussion board seriously. • Empowers students to become better readers. • Eliminates plagiarism (or at least makes it much more difficult).

5. English Studies • The content of the discipline, i.e., the poetry, novels, and plays. • The theories about the literature, i.e., criticism of individual works, biographies, histories, cultural studies, classical approaches. • Theories about the study of literature itself or a kind of “meta-commentary.”

6. Contributing to the Study of Literature Occurs at all three levels. • Responses to the individual works. • Integration of procedures and associations on the critical level. • Ruminations on the study of literature itself.

7. Literature and Conversation Is conversation essential to the study of literature? If so, does the online environment help students converse in ways meaningful enough for them to become a part of “the conversation about literature”?

8. Communication vs. Conversation • Many students are comfortable communicating in the online environment. • Instant Messaging • Facebook • MySpace • What characterizes this type of communication? • This type of communication will not achieve the higher learning goals possible with a true conversation.

9. What Conversation Is Not • Purposeful (serving as a means to an end) • Argumentative (pointedly speaking to influence and/or change others) • Scripted (meeting a predetermined level of humor or other specified content) • Hierarchical (centered upon the ideas of specific “authorities) • Partitioned • Soliloquizing

10. Online Discussions • Online discussions are purposeful. • Discussion strictly adheres to social conventions and/or rules. • It is a “scripted” expression. • To be interactive, postings are often seen as agreeing with or opposing an earlier view. • The discussion board is authority centered. • Independent posts account for the presence of “non-sequiturs.”

11. Online Discussion and Non Sequitur • Student responses that agree and then discuss a view point do not necessarily extend the previous point. • Student responses are fulfilling a requirement and enter into the discussion at convenient opportunities, regardless of topic or prior submissions. • Students then indulge in “non sequitur” submissions in the guise of conversation, but these can be valuable to the discussion.

12. What Is a Meaningful Posting? • Surprises • Focuses • Expands • Reflects • Integrates

13. The Magic Factor • Good postings hint at a student who is creating knowledge as he or she writes. Such postings have energy. • Poor postings display a student’s unwillingness to engage with the material, the course and other students.

14. Achieving the Magic Factor • Provide clear instructions and prompts for students so that they understand the nature of the high quality posting. • Require students to integrate the postings into other parts of the class – in our case, the paper assignments.

15. Ephemeral vs. Sustained Text • From the student perspective, online discourse is “ephemeral.” • From the professor’s vantage point, online discourse is sustained.

16. Students and Literary Conversation • Students use information from other students to show how the comments helped them achieve a better understanding of the literary text. They’re using other student comments to “fill in the gaps.” • Students use the postings to help establish common ground with each other. Helps them determine the extent to which a “reading problem” is individual or commonplace. Student provide each other with models of reading. • Students use the postings to expand their interpretation of a literary work. A student may have a good understanding of the work, but another student can reveal further “depth.” Demonstrates how a community of readers can expand the individual’s view or interpretation.

17. Result: Students Participate in True Conversation Once students go back and read over the text then they have taken part in a true literary conversation because they have been able to deliberate over other student comments and to use those comments as a springboard for their own sustained analysis of a text.

18. Contact Information Keith Geekie: kgeekie@jccc.edu James McWard: jmcward@jccc.edu