I was afraid of this

May 13, 2005

I was afraid of this

I posted about getting a sitter for Josh while Jack is in pre-school so I could get some *real* work done now that Brian is back full-time. A sitter that I'm paying dearly for (this is mostly my fault, as I insist on overpaying my sitters considerably).

And here I sit in the library parking lot, reading freaking blogs. And now posting. Instead of working. >sigh<

So, a quick note about sunshine, getting a little tan, and THEN having that overdue eyebrow wax. Don't do it, man. You'll look MORE ridiculous with a big white space between your eyebrows than you do with all that hair connecting them. And yes, this attests to 1) the enormous need I have for waxing and 2) that I neglect that need horribly.

But to the more official point of this post:

I'm finding, as I try to "grade" weblogs, that in order to grade something, you must first offer expectations about that something so that the producers of that something can be expected to fulfill those expectations. What I mean is (and this, for all us teachers out there, is a big no-duh but this is how my life always ends up: NO DUH, madeline) that this rubric that I'm trying to create in order to assess the blogs that the digital writing students occupied this past semester should have been written 16 weeks ago and provided to them as a guideline.

This is totally my bust. It occurred to me early on, and only in passing, that these blogs would be murder to assess. But I resisted trying to make the writers write them a certain way, or follow a particular model, or whatever, simply because part of the idea about blogs is that they are fairly writer-centered. You can do pretty much whatever you want with them, and the reader has much more responsibility to make sense of and use what the writer is putting out there than we traditionally require of readers. I'm not saying that the blog allows for sloppy, incoherent writing, but wait--yes, I am. And I'm saying that sloppy, incoherent writing can be generative and productive and useful for writers AND readers.

Not that what we've got in these student blogs is sloppy or incoherent. Most of them are actually quite well-composed, with few-ish typos and minor erros of that nature.

But how do you assess? Here's the problem. The problem is that the work done in and around blogs is not the entries themselves, but in the larger interaction between writers and readers that isn't explicit in posts or in comments. The success of blogs is in a much more holistic experience that exists as a result after sustained engagement, over time, with writing and reading and discussion.

The parts of a blog (entries, comments, etc) when taken together with the parts of other blogs with which that blog interacts, make up much more than what the material whole (many posts and many comments with many links) constitutes.

So here I am, with a spread sheet open, reading entries and making note of comments and checking things off and arbitrarily giving and taking points for things like "depth of discussion" and entry length. This sucks big time.

I can't dock for grammar, incomplete expression of ideas, too short or too long entries. I can only count posts, match them to the appropriate prompts, and note comments to see whether the requirement is fulfilled.

I'll still be finishing the rubric, but it won't really be applicable to this semester's project. And I'm not sure if I want to apply it to next semester's, either.

Posted by mryonker at May 13, 2005 11:09 AM

Comments

In reverse order:
1. Yeah, we all know we should outline our expectations first, but sometimes experimenting with new assignments requires putting carts before horses. (Maybe it would have been helpful to have the students help create the "rubric"?)

2. A little bit o' bronzer will clear that naked patch right up.

3. Guilt over wasting money *can* be quite the motivator for some. Not for me (it just creates more anxiety), but definitely for some.

Posted by: susansinclair at May 13, 2005 03:02 PM

Boy, you're right on with the interaction being the most important thing. And how do you grade that? How do you encourage it in the first place? Is 16 weeks enough time? I'll be facing this dilemma in the fall.

Posted by: Laura at May 13, 2005 10:35 PM

Everybody does that--gives some open-ended assignment and then ends up kicking themselves at the end of the semester. It's normal. A pain in the ass, but normal.

And it's not "over"paying sitters. It's paying 'em what they're worth. I always do it too. Good on ya.

Posted by: bitchphd at May 13, 2005 11:07 PM

and it's too late to have them write their own rubrics... because them accounting for what they've accomplished, doing that reflecting--DOING what you're trying to do--i think would be infinitely more informative as an accounting of what they've learned than what's on the blogs anyway...

barring that, best you can do i think is look for an apparent consistency between purpose & execution--did the ones who set out to be prolific & casually chatty maintain that tone while also saying something substantive? did the ones who were reluctant to get into it at all get braver and start writing more as the course went on? the ones who seemed to be setting out to do something of consequence & succeeded are the ones who deserve As. the ones who set out to do something mediocre & did, or set out with huge goals & settled for a limping effort get Bs & Cs. the ones who were ambivalent about the whole thing--or gung-ho with little-to-no follow-through get Ds. now your job is just to figure all that out just from looking at their blogs!

Posted by: tyra at May 15, 2005 06:24 PM

Seeing as I've known you a lot longer than the others that have posted comments on this entry, I feel justified and will indeed take issue with a different focus than they have - your 'monobrow' or 'unibrow', if you will. I warned you in high school, didn't I? And you were a lot "tanner" then...

Posted by: John at May 22, 2005 10:04 PM