Pros & cons of group vs private submission & review

Posted by Dr. Karen F. Kellison, Program Director Educational Technology, James Madison University, to an IT forum that I follow. See also Death to the Digital Dropbox: Rethinking Student Privacy and Public Performance, by Patrick R. Lowenthal and David Thomas. All this goes to the question of public vs private submission, peer review (sharing writing with group), group work, etc. 

updates on multiliterate and other ESL chaos

 I created a Multiliteracies PLN (or facsimile thereof) tab on my public NetVibes page, and then posted a screen shot of the page + brief note with link to my Multiliteracies blog on Ning.

This evening, one of my almost students in Blogging English emailed me privately with a question about starting a PLN. I replied but directly to the blog (sorry the blog is private - just for the class). Then I found the student had not yet joined the class, so I did have to write the student privately to explain that he was not a member of the class until he joined the blog. I can't imagine why he thought he could be part of the class without joining it. That's a new one - and something to address in future letters to new students.

Now I need to find a few "PLN for newbies" links and decide how to organize hosting student PLNs on the blog. I can add pages, but we don't have an unlimited number available. I think each student can put PLN in a post and then edit as needed.

Online class/es update: writing group & another

Writing Group:

Writing samples (in form of short essay length application letters) are coming in... slowly as is their wont. Neither NS nor NNS corner the marker on writing reluctance. Reminder: design a series of short writing assignments (narrative, descriptive, process, before kicking into high gear.

Housekeeping: Google group set up; Wiki under consideration; individual students answered personally; course plan in rough draft; resources being collected and organized; design assignments for weeks 1-3; set up synchronous office hours in chat; update David and ask for changes in StudyCom listings.

"More About This Class" letter sent ~ not a Welcome letter. Odds are a number of recipients won't make it into the class because they did not expect to have to write more than a short, unedited paragraph from time to time and won't write the longer application letter.

and now about the "other" ... it's like this ~ I went to EFI Beginner mailbox to collect address and write applicants sorry not doing this anymore" message but had second thoughts. Why not start another self-paced study group? Learning from and improving on the last one ~ though still gormless of me not to have saved the files.

Related articles

• Sometimes you just have to write (trishussey.com)
•  Why write? Why does writing well matter? (openlearn.open.ac.uk)
• Beginning Writing: Short Writing Assignments (esl.about.com) 
  
• Advanced Writing: Expanding Descriptive Verb Use (esl.about.com)