Over the years, I have intermittently used audio to comment on student writing. I have used it in both face-to-face and in online classes. The students seem to like it, and there seems to be substantial research that supports the benefits of this way of responding, as opposed to scribbling notes on the margins, or even typing on a draft. The main benefit, according to this research, seems to be that student writers tend to see such aural feedback as more "holistic." They look for a "general impression" about their writing on the part of the instructor rather than getting stuck on mistakes and comments on writing's minutiae. Of course, there are stages in the writing process when you _are_ looking for them to pay attention to those minutiae, but not always. On the instructor's end, audio comments allow for more extensive and detailed feedback than typing or writing by hand would typically allow.

But how to do it technically? In the past, I have used drop.io, which is a free service which allows you to uploads large media files and then send the link to a an e-mail address. That worked file but I felt like the process of responding and sending the mp3 file links was sort of separate from the process of reading and seeing the paper online.

This time, I have been experimenting with Riffly, a Drupal module which allow to embed audio and video content into Drupal posts. I think I am going to respond to the next batch of student papers using Riffly right there, on my Drupal-powered class site. I am sticking with audio for this one, so no talking heads.

I know that this is probably Twitter material rather than a blog post, but I do not tweet, so here goes. There is something weird about those live/online events where a group of people gather in a room and watch/hear a presenter with a bunch of Powerpoint slides glide in front of them on a big screen. I am currently at the Educause ELI focus group conducted here at JMU through Adobe Connect. I am hoping for some lively face to face discussions with the people in the room, after the presentation is over.  I am wondering whether a better way for these types of events would not be a live video conference via Skype of some such application, rather than the sound/Powerpoint combination. Oh, and by the way, the topic of the current presentation is assessment of student work online. Also, it seems to me that people who give talks about, essentially, online instructional design, should design more engaging visual presentations than slide after slide of bullet point lists.

Now, to the substance of the talk. A significant part of the talk was dedicated to building trust among collaborating learners. I think this is a topic that is often overlooked in literature, with many scholars, especially in rhetoric and composition, tending to think about collaboration as this "warm and fuzzy" process in which everyone agrees on everything and things go smoothly. I am glad that this speaker mentions the notion that collaborating learners and writers "do not have to like one another" and still get the work done. Conflict and conflict resolution are important parts of the collaborative process. What is even more timely, that one of my graduate students who is also present at this session, jut blogged about this on our class's website.

Just about a year and a half after Kirk St. Amant and myself published The Handbook of Research of Virtual Workplaces and the New Nature of Business Practices (IGI), the journal Technical Communication published a review of the book, written by Gary Hernandez, a communication manager for BP and frequent contributor of book reviews to the journal. The review is generally positive. Here is a passage from it:

Considering the speed of business and the pace [with which] technological innovations continue to progress, Handbook of research on virtual workplaces and the new nature of business practices runs the risk of depleting its relevancy in a few short years. For the time being, it is bound to prove a great resource for students and practitioners of communication.

While we cannot do anything about the fast pace of the development of technologies, I am pleased that Hernandez thinks that at least for the time being, the book is a good resource.

It has been a while since I posted an update on the progress of the open access composition text Writing Spaces which I am co-editing with Charlie Lowe. WS is a peer edited collection of essays on college composition (at least that is its scope for now), which we are developing in partnership with Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse.

After receiving over 100 proposals and selecting about 60 last spring, we broke the accepted proposals into two volumes. The first volume essays are currently being reviewed by the members of our editorial board, and the volume is on schedule to be published in late winter or early spring. The second volume will follow shortly thereafter.

Promoting the project remains a priority, so I will be showcasing it during the annual Spilman Symposium on Issues in Teaching Writing to be help next weekend at the Virginia Military Institute.

For the past year or so, my colleague Diane Wilcox and I have been working on an edited collection entitled Design and Implementation of Educational Video Games. Diane and I came to this project from two somewhat different perspectives. She is an instructional designer, I am a rhetorician and a communicator. That is what made this project so interesting, in large part. I am happy to report that last night, we sent the final version of the manuscript to our publisher, IGI Global. Nothing much to say here...