#worthassigning: Eli Review's Lessons for Students on Feedback and Revision

I am preparing a faculty development workshop on how to teach students to give good feedback to one another on writing, and how to help students use that feedback to revise.

I just came across a wonderful site by the team at Eli Review that introduces Feedback and Revision to Students. 

Feedback and Improvement: Becoming a Better Writer by Helping Other Writers --http://elireview.com/content/students/feedback

Rethinking and Revising: Using Feedback to Improve Our Writing --http://elireview.com/content/students/revision/

These introductions for students are part of a larger curriculum guide -- http://elireview.com/content/curriculum/introduction/ -- written for teachers. The curriculum guide explores how to use Eli specifically to enact the ideas presented to students in the introductions above.

Here's what I like about the student materials. First, consider this screen shot from "Feedback and Improvement."

Image 1: Feedback and Improvement Navigation is Clean and Fast

You see that the lines are clean, the space uncluttered. Navigation is clear via the numbered parts navigation top center. Note too the positive assertion -- "everyone can be a helpful reviewer," which is both true and friendly in its assertion.

That emphasis on "you can do this" carries into the prose and videos and images that make up the unit. Here's a sample:

Trust is particularly important because feedback can lead to big changes in our writing. But trust has to be earned. Gaining confidence in the quality of the feedback we get and give occurs over time, with practice. 

SUNY-Albany Professor Emeritus Peter Johnston observed in Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives:

If students can provide productive feedback, then collectively they will tend to get more feedback. And it will be more immediate feedback, because, rather than waiting for the teacher, their peers can provide it. More feedback improves learning, and immediate feedback is more effective than delayed feedback.

Even in small classes, instructor feedback is limited by the amount of time instructors have to respond. But more feedback and faster feedback is possible between peers. That feedback can sometimes be more helpful than instructor feedback.

The Eli Review team doesn't skirt the issue at hand -- writers have to trust reviews; and that trust needs to be earned. One of the biggest qualms faculty have about doing more peer feedback centers on this lack of trust: writers don't trust the feedback they get; reviewers don't trust their ability to give good feedback. The pedagogy explored, the advice given to students, gets directly at ways of building that trust, that confidence.

Note too that the piece quotes research from the field. The lesson builds a case for peer feedback, gives students concrete advice, and sites relevant research on the value of making that advice work in practice.

The larger curricular piece for instructors, "Framing Feedback and Revision," written by Melissa Graham Meeks and Mike McLeod, gives instructors a lesson plan sequence, ready to use activities, they can use in Eli Review. But even if you're not using Eli Review, both the two introductions for students and the curricular plan for teachers, can be adapted to other settings and tools. 

And that's what makes the lessons for students on Feedback and Revision worth assigning, and the curriculum guide for faculty worth visiting and adapting.

#worthassigning: five online essays by Charles Moran

In Case You Don't Know Charlie Moran, An Introduction

On Father's Day, June 21, 2015, Charlie Moran died at home, with his wife, Kay, and his two children, Seth and Amy, by his side. He lived a wonderful life, energetic and generous, as this profile, published after his death in the North Hampton Gazette, illustrates. I recommend it for a fuller sense of the man and his remarkable contributions to teaching writing, his community, and his family.

As for me, I first came to know Charlie, I think, back in 1991, when I began as a graduate student in the PhD program at the English Department of U. Mass, Amherst. I started teaching there in a computer networked classroom -- a local area network built on Novell, with WordPerfect as the word processing software, a simple tool for making class announcements, and what was then a new program for real time online classroom discussions in writing called Daedalus Interchange.

Charlie, along with Marcia Curtis, oversaw the graduate student teachers who taught in the two networked classrooms; both he and Marcia innovated pedagogically, she focusing on perhaps one of the best basic writing programs ever developed, and he on traditional first year writing courses. Most of my time in those classrooms came with Charlie as my course director. Through that, and as I also took graduate courses with him on teaching with technology, he opened up doors to an online world of teachers who taught writing with computers (a novelty then), a world where I found a way of intellectual and professional life I enjoy and cherish to this day. 

Things You'll Notice About Charlie's Academic Writing

The other thing Charlie did, besides being a great teacher, and did productively, was write and encourage his graduate students to write and publish. He was a teacher-scholar who pursued both parts of the hyphenate equally, the art of one and the discipline of the other informing each other. He shared his insights with the field at large in his body of published works, at conferences, and via voce in the classrooms and offices at Bartlett Hall. His work models how to be a teacher-scholar.

He collaborated with graduate students on essays. He collaborated with colleagues. And even when he solo authored, his work often referenced or thanked those who read drafts, helped his thinking. This is no small thing, this collaboration.  The UMass Writing Program encourages GTA's to explore and use collaboration in the design of courses, via peer review, the sharing of drafts, discussions to foster ideas, and for asking for co-authored projects by students. Charlie practiced what he taught his first year students; that practice made him a better teacher of those things he asked his students to learn.

In looking over the pieces I've found online that he's written or co-written, I notice some wonderful things. The chief quality that comes through is his devotion to teaching and learning, evidenced by a deep respect for students and teachers. His pedagogical inquiries, his application of theory, always put students and their learning at the absolute center, and teachers in close proximity. Even when an essay doesn't evoke a student directly, reading it you can see that students are central to his concern. 

A look back shows that Charlie's brilliance as an academic writer came from his ability to observe and reflect. So many of his pieces observe students, or his own or colleagues' teaching practices, or larger trends (automatic writing assessment engines; testing mania). Whether looking at small acts of practice or and larger trends, he looked to see how they supported or distorted the central mission and necessary relationship teachers and students share. 

A Tangent: Charlie as Observer and Teaching Mentor

I remember, in rereading some of his essays, how great he was at doing teaching observations of graduate student teachers he was assigned to mentor. Charlie would come into the computer networked classroom, find a terminal that wasn't going to be used, and sit unobtrusively. Charlie would sit and write on the keyboard, creating a running narrative of what he observed about the class, the teaching and the dynamics, noticing things the teacher could not. I don't have those reports any longer, but I remember things like, to quote approximately, "this class has a row of male jocks, all with ball caps and broad shoulders sharing the back terminals, almost like a frat row in the classroom." Or, "as Nick leans over an helps two students, students a row back, swap files and both type feedback into one another's draft, they are discussing the drafts as they type, but also other things, using off tasks asides, it seems, to keep them largely on task." He'd capture the telling detail, the nature of interaction, and do so on the fly in long, generous reports that came from continuous typing as he looked; his hands operated independently of his eyes and ears, transposing what his mind made of things as he continued to watch and listen. Discussion afterwards about what he noticed, what interpretation he had based on what he could see, became apprenticeships in reflection. He'd ask questions that would lead, at least in my experience, to teaching insights, finding strengths, and finding weaknesses, and talking about both with equal comfort and candor.

Reflection imbues so much of Charlie's writing in the essays below. Some of pieces are about his adjustment to technology -- or in one case, going to a classroom where it was absent. One essay frames modestly his work based on his own classroom observations as auto ethnographic, not seeking to make a big claim. But those pieces are finely wrought, hand-crafted jewels of insight that, even though the technology in question may be twenty years past, offer lessons in adjustment, observation, reflection, patience, and humility which matter still. They serve as useful models in faculty professional development, as ways faculty can explore their own teaching, can explore whatever technology they have on hand, whether it is very new or somewhat bewhiskered. 

Other pieces are more contemporary, and many of the links, you'll see, are made available via the National Writing Project, an organization Charlie devoted some of his best thinking, leadership, and writing to. 

All of the pieces, too, are well-written. Charlie has an accessible academic writing voice, making his work especially useful for people new to a field as well as important to those long versed in the literature. Charlie cites important and complex thinkers as needed, but still writes in a way that uses specialized terms and jargon minimally, in sentences of ordinary length with strong verbs. He writes, really, what seems to me speakable prose; that is, you can read it aloud and hear a cadence easy on the ear. 

So for all these reasons, I think the following works of Charles Moran are worth assigning, and if you do assign or read them, I hope they open the door to reading some of the excellent work he's done that doesn't happen to be readily available online but can be found easily enough in a campus library's academic journal catalogs, or his work in books, perhaps the in stacks. 

Five Online Essays by Charlie Moran that  Are #WorthAssigning

I've included a small excerpt from each essay, so you have a sense of its flavor, and sometimes a note two about the essay and why I recommend it specifically. These are in chronological order, oldest to newest.

Title

with Nick Carbone, Margaret Daisley, Ed Federenko, Dix McComas,Dori Ostermiller, and Sherri Vanden Akker, "Writing Ourselves Online." in Computers and Composition 10(3), August 1993, pages 29-48.

Excerpt

At the beginning of our project, six of us divided into pairs. We looked at each other's online language in "Class News" bulletins, in online prompts and messages we left for our students, and in the comments we volunteered in Daedalus INTERCHANGE sessions. In addition, we observed our partner's classes, focusing on our partner's live classroom presence. Then, with our partners, we co-wrote drafts of the three sections that follow. We also met regularly as a full group during the semester and the subsequent summer to reflect upon what we were seeing and writing and to focus and refocus the project.  

As we proceeded with our project, it became clear that each of us had a different online voice. Yet each of us was, according to our student-teacher evaluations, a "good" teacher. Like the Lake Wobegon children, we were all above average. We could, therefore, freely speak of "difference," but we could not so easily speak of "good" or "bad" ways of presenting ourselves online.  

Further, it became clear to us that our online presences existed in a complementary relation to our live, off-line presences. Together the two worked, though in each case differently. We knew of a strand in the literature in our field that assumed that we should each adapt to the computer-equipped classrooms in the same way (e.g., Barker & Kemp, 1990; Handa, 1990; Kiefer, 1991; Klem & Moran, 1992; Spitzer, 1990).  

These studies begin with the assumption that technology drives change. Because we were teachers, what we saw was perhaps inevitably different: that different teachers will successfully use technology in different ways, adapting it to their different goals and needs. We came to believe that the relationship between teacher and technology was what Paul Levinson (1990) has termed a "flexible, feedback process" (p. 7). We write, therefore, as soft technological determinists (Pool, 1990, p. vii) who know that we influence, and are influenced by, our environment. How the teacher uses a given teaching environment depends upon the character of that environment, of course, but it also depends upon who that teacher is. As William Carlos Williams tells us, "It all depends. . . ." 

Note My recollection -- apologies to my co-authors if I am wrong -- is that Charlie wordsmithed most of the excerpt above, from the article's "Note on Method" section. I draw on this essay because it shows a bit how Charlie mentored graduate students -- all of us listed as his co-authors were graduate students who were part of his course director group. We meet regularly as a team on a range of issues related to teaching. Charlie used the project to help us learn how to observe teaching, to work with fellows as peer mentors, to practice good teacher reflections, to collaborate on an article, and to meet the needs and goals his role as a course director required. So as a teacher-scholar, the experience was as much about how to work productively, getting as much value from the work we had to do as possible. I also remember that after the article was accepted, and final draft sent in, Charlie turned to us and said something like, "my habit is to put these behind me once their done and turn to the next project," and so we didn't talk about it after it was sent, but moved on.

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Title
"From a High-Tech to a Low-Tech Writing Classroom: You Can't Go Home Again," in The Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer 2000. Available at http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/782

Excerpt

I begin to resent, too, the amount of new work I seem to have to do. For instance, I've had to go all the way to my office to get to my computer to put together a writing exercise for the class, print multiple copies on blue paper, and cut the pages in half to distribute to the class. I wrote, "All this cutting and copying is time- and resource-consuming!" 

I resent the grade book I have to construct for myself and my need to discover a new way of organizing the course. I wonder: should I purchase a three-ring binder? And an ominous note: I begin to feel that as a teacher I have to become more active, because I'm feeling that not much is happening.

Note This is one of my favorite pieces, and I share it in workshops with faculty who are just beginning to take deeper dives into using technology. It focuses on what is lost when one goes back to not using the technology after coming to rely on it, and so it reverses the anxiety many faculty feel when they start to use technology. Charlie does a great job of making a simple brick and mortar classroom feel strange. The essay also shows Charlie at his reflective best, for example in this expert you see it in his "ominous note" about starting to do more in the classroom -- filling time and air -- because it's harder for him  to get students engaged without the technology he became used to using.

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Title

"Computers and Composition 1983–2002: What we have hoped for" in Computers and Composition 20 (2003) 343–358. Available at http://rhetcomp.gsu.edu/~bgu/8121/Reading-Moran.pdf

Excerpt

In accounting for the optimistic and positive tone of our journal, the cultural cross-currents I’ve referred to are important. But at least as important as these cultural forces has been the agency of particular people at particular times. As a community we reflect the values of our leaders (they’d hate to be called this, but they are and have been)—three generous, energetic, and hopeful teacher–scholars: Kate Kiefer, Cynthia Selfe, and Gail Hawisher. These remarkable teacher–scholars have drawn to their work others who share the same generosity, energy, and optimism. This group, call it a de facto (and partially de jure) editorial board, has shaped the journal and the community, infusing both with temperament, enthusiasm, and vision.

Note I love this short excerpt because it captures so much the spirit and generosity of Charlie. In this project, he acted as both emcee to, and historian of, the nearly 20 years the central journal in the field of Computers and Composition had been publishing, rereading every issue to prepare the article. That he rightly acknowledges the founding editors, citing their work as a team that engaged collegially with their readers and authors, bespeaks too, in a single-authored piece, his belief in collaboration and community building. As a piece that looks at the history of one journal, it's a great survey piece for an introductory course on teaching writing with computers.

In 2003, the same year Charlie published this piece, Computers and Composition initiated The Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field. The editors write:

The award celebrates the first 20 years of the journal (1983-2003) in which Charles Moran not only contributed over 30 publications-books, articles, chapters-to the profession but also supported the growth of the journal and field in multiple ways as a valued member of the Computers and Composition Editorial Board. We can think of no other person who better exemplifies what it means to be an esteemed scholar and colleague in these rapidly changing times of the information age.

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Title

With Anne Herrington, "Challenges for Writing Teachers: Evolving Technologies and Standardized Assessment." in Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom, edited by Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran. Copyright © 2009 by Teachers College, Columbia University. Available at http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/12466/Teaching_New_Writing_Chapter1.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d

Excerpt

Writing teachers have inevitably felt pressured to change from the forces we have listed above. But more important, teachers, and in particular those who have contributed to this book, have felt the world of writing shifting under them and have wanted to account for this change in their teaching. These teachers are embracing technology in their teaching, to support not only the learning of traditional essay texts but also new electronic text types—what Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2006) call “post-typographic forms of texts” (p. 23). These new electronic texts—a Web site with words and images, blogs where multiple readers and writers contribute—challenge our basic notion of written texts as linear, verbal, single-authored texts.

At the same time that new forms of writing—and thus literacy—are emerging in our culture and in our classrooms, forces of assessment and standardization exert a counter-pressure, asking us to prepare students to produce conventional, formulaic print texts in scripted ways. Paradoxically, technology is also being harnessed for these purposes by educational publishers and testing companies, taking the form of machine-scoring and responding to student writing. So it is that technology seems to be leading us forward to new forms of writing, but, as used by standardized testing programs, backward to the five-paragraph theme.

Teachers are caught in this conflict, for their students’ sake wanting to respond to the changes taking place in this thing we call writing, and at the same time wanting their students to do well in the 19th-century school essay called for on standardized tests.

Note As the first chapter of an edited collection, this piece surveys the evolution of computer technology in writing courses, moving in particular to assessment technologies. I chose this excerpt because it includes the kind of trenchant observation Charlie was so good at making: that instead of using technology to move to 21st Century writing needs, testing is preparing students for 19th Century writing. The full chapter is online and excerpts from other chapters, as well as ordering information for the book, can be found in the link with the book's title above.

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Title
With Anne Herrington, "Writing to a Machine is Not Writing At All," an essay hosted online by The National Writing Project. Undated, but guess is about 2010 or 11 based on the citations. Available at http://digitalis.nwp.org/sites/default/files/files/44/MoranHerringtonms.pdf

Excerpt

Imagine the effect of this 95%-wrong feedback on the student writer and on the teacher. The feedback would at the least confuse the student writer, leaving the teacher somehow to counter the confusion—although if the student were using her Criterion card on her own, as purchased from the bookstore, there would be no teacher to intervene. If the student accepted the feedback, here are some of the lessons that would be learned: do not use e.g., or texting, or peloton, in any of your writing; do not use the dash as a mark of punctuation; shorten and simplify all sentences so that the program will be able to parse them accurately; do not use inductive, specific-to-general, sequences, but stick with deduction—topic sentence first. Among our goals as writing teachers are these: help students discover and use their voices; help them take risks with their writing; help them master the grammar, usage, mechanics, and styles of written English. In this trial, and in earlier trials we have reported on (see Herrington and Moran 2009, Herrington and Stanley), Criterion has proved not a useful assessment tool but, to quote Ed White again, “a major impediment to what we need to do for our students” (1994, 3). 

Note The essay looks at how Criterion, ETS's automated writing feedback tool, treats student writing. As you can see, Anne and Charlie found it treats students shabbily, in ways counter to what good teachers seek to do and what students need to learn about writing. Charlie's early work, as you saw above, looked at teachers adapting their pedagogy -- enhancing it, or trying to -- via technology. Here and in other later work, especially with Anne, the focus is on what comes when technology is imposed between student and teacher.

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#worthassigning: Paul Ford's What is Code?

Adam Whitehurst, a colleague at the Bedford/St. Martin's Imprint of Macmillan, shared this link with folks in house:  http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/.

It's a long, funny, sane piece that posits an audience of people-in-charge of big things or departments approving or overseeing a project that involves coding, and spending a lot of money on coding, and not quite getting what the is meant by code and how coding and software design happens.

So it explains that, but in eminently readable prose, like this

This man makes a third less than you, and his education ended with a B.S. from a large, perfectly fine state university. But he has 500+ connections on LinkedIn. That plus sign after the "500" bothers you. How many more than  500 people does he know? Five? Five thousand?

In some mysterious way, he outranks you. Not within the company, not in restaurant reservations, not around lawyers. Still: He strokes his short beard; his hands are tanned; he hikes; his socks are embroidered with little ninja.

“Don’t forget,” he says, “we’ve got to budget for apps.”

This is real. A Scrum Master in ninja socks has come into your office and said, “We’ve got to budget for apps.” Should it all go pear-shaped, his career will be just fine.

You keep your work in perspective by thinking about barrels of cash. You once heard that a U.S. dry barrel can hold about $100,000 worth of singles. Next year, you’ll burn a little under a barrel of cash on Oracle. One barrel isn’t that bad. But it’s never one barrel. Is this a 5-barrel project or a 10-barreler? More? Too soon to tell. But you can definitely smell money burning.

At this stage in the meeting, you like to look supplicants in the eye and say, OK, you’ve given me a date and a budget. But when will it be done? Really, truly, top-line-revenue-reporting finished? Come to confession; unburden your soul.

The piece is multimodal, playfully so,  making a little sly fun of code and coding too as it goes. For example, when you get to the end, you're told how many words you "read" and how fast. (So yes, go to the link, read the first paragraph or two, then scroll to the bottom to see what I mean.)

The piece is worth assigning in writing courses with technology themes or issues, cultural study courses, technical communication courses, philosophy (yes, philosophy) courses, where any goal of the course is to understand humanity's relationship to machines. Turning again to Ford, he reminds us that the role of code in our lives, how we perceive ourselves and our world, is deep and vast:

What I’m saying is, I’m one of 18 million. So that’s what I’m writing: my view of software development, as an individual among millions. Code has been my life, and it has been your life, too. It is time to understand how it all works.

Every month it becomes easier to do things that have never been done before, to create new kinds of chaos and find new kinds of order. Even though my math skills will never catch up, I love the work. Every month, code changes the world in some

Images come from Ford's piece, collected as a single image to here to fully quote the closing sentence, its use of images and its layout.

The idea that coders or programmers are the unacknowledged legislators of our world, a riff on Percy Bysshe Shelley's concluding sentence in "A Defence of Poetry," that Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, is not new observation. Ford, however, while never using that riff, explains in a sustained and detailed way, how that legislation-by-coders gets written and enacted, with far more nuance and as much mirth as School House Rock's "I'm Just a Bill."

Depending on your approach and what you want to emphasize, you might want to ask students to first read this short HP interview Ben Cosgrove had with Douglas Rushkoff about consumers increased need for media literacy. Ford's piece goes a long way to giving students the kinds of context and understanding useful for understanding the kinds of web literacy Rushkoff advocates. The interview is short too, serving as useful pre-reading activity that can activate the minds of students, giving them ideas to link to, play off from, and discuss with one another as they read Ford's longer work.

Ford's piece touches not just on coding, but too on coding culture, making connections to the culture at large or aspects of the culture at large most faculty (and many students in the age of *Cons) will recognize:

Technology conferences are where primate dynamics can be fully displayed, where relationships of power and hierarchy can be established. There are keynote speakers—often the people who created the technology at hand or crafted a given language. There are the regular speakers, often paid not at all or in airfare, who present some idea or technique or approach. Then there are the panels, where a group of people are lined up in a row and forced into some semblance of interaction while the audience checks its e-mail. 

I’m a little down on panels. They tend to drift. I’m not sure why they exist. 

Here’s the other thing about technology conferences: There has been much sexual harassment and much sexist content in conferences. Which is stupid, because computers are dumb rocks lacking genitalia, but there you have it.

Who among us has not noticed or remarked, if only has part of graduate school rites of passage in the academic realm, on the "primate dynamics" at our own academic, industry or company sales conferences (and yet not nearly so smartly as to use the phrase 'primate dynamics' when doing so)?

Ford's piece also serves as model of bravura writing, of multimodal composing, mixing in not just the usual elements of image and video, but also the coding element of the recurring bot I urged you to see by scrolling to the bottom of the text.

So there's a lot to work with in the piece, but I especially like it because of its length and range. I think too often we worry about student attention spans, about keeping readings short, and about the belief that long reading is serious and dense. This piece finds a sweet middle: its long and fun, requires time, but makes the time pass well enough. It's a good piece for helping readers develop the skills needed to stay with a longer text, giving them practice in doing so, and could be useful in setting up a later long reading that may not be delivered with as much joy.

There will be things, and this is a good thing, students may need to re-read, to look up, to ask questions about, to talk to classmates about to see how they're understanding the piece. But that kind of reading is needed in courses because it helps bring learners to conversation.

And as you can see from just the few snippets I've quoted above, Ford's piece can spur worth discussions, and thus is worth assigning.

#worthassigning: Derek Muller's "This Will Revolutionize Education"

Derek Muller, profiled here in Scientific American (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/03/15/meet-derek-mueller-winner-of-the-cyberscreen-science-film-festival/), is an Australian scholar with a PhD in Physic Education Research, a road that has taken him to the study of digital learning.

He has a YouTube channel with a mix of physics lessons and the nature of learning. Among those videos, a link to which came from Chris Clark via POD-L,  is one called "This Will Revolutionize Education" (https://ltlatnd.wordpress.com/2015/04/24/this-will-revolutionize-education/). I've linked to Clark's blog post so you can see how Chris frames the video, which looks at why, so far, digital technologies have failed to really revolution education. And he looks pretty closely at the nature of learning along way to describing what technology evangelists often leave out of their imaginings and hype.

Consider this example,  a text excerpt from the roughly 7 minute video, from the 2:55 - 4:40 point that I typed up.

Let's consider the process of learning. Say you want to teach someone how a human heart pumps blood. Which learning aid do you think would be more effective? This animation with narration, or this set of static images with text? Obviously the animation is better. For one thing, it shows exactly what the heart does.

For decades educational research focused on questions like this: does a video promote learning better than a book? Are live lectures more effective than televised lectures? Is animation better than static graphics?

In all well controlled studies, the result is No Significant Difference.

That is, so long as the content is equivalent between the two treatments, the learning outcomes are the same with all different media.

How is this possible? How can something which seems so powerful like animation be no more effective than static graphics? Well, for one thing, animations are fleeting and so you might miss something as they go by. Plus, since the parts are animated for you, you don't have to mentally envision how the parts are moving, and so you don't have to invest as much mental effort, which would make it more memorable. In fact, sometimes static graphic perform better than animations.

If you're teaching a course in digital learning, humanities, multimedia delivery and presentation, course design, online learning and the like, the video should prove useful.

If you're working as program administrator, doing professional development with teachers who are being asked to engage digital learning technologies, Muller builds to the point that technology is evolutionary, and that "the foundation of education is still based on the social interaction between teachers and students." So this is uplifting.

But the video is also the basis for departure. What does evolution mean? If you're in a graduate program readying for a career as a full-time, tenure track college professor, will you be hired as the kind of teacher you see in your seminars, or will you be among those who shift to becoming a learning coach as described by Christine Seifert and Richard Chapman in "The Coaching Transformation."

That is, technology will, over time, -- because its happening now--, change significantly the nature of "the social interaction between teachers and students."

So perhaps the most vital use of this video and the discussions that might come from it are not so much Muller's celebration of the centrality of students and teachers working together, but rather what kind of new expertise teachers will need, and what roles they may no longer be asked to perform going forward.

#worthassigning: Effective Peer Review Assignment Design from the Eli Review Team

The team at Eli Peer Review (http://elireview.com) has a new professional development piece up for faculty on designing effective peer review assignments at http://elireview.com/content/td/reviews/. If you do faculty development, tutor training, like using digital tools to teach, offer a writing and the teaching of writing course, you'll find this invaluable. 

The full module includes video pieces from professors and useful illustrative graphics, but here's a humble text excerpt from the piece that speaks to its quality and smarts:

Reviews from which writers receive helpful feedback that will drive revision rarely happen without coaching, especially with novice reviewers. Teachers in feedback-rich classrooms must give as much attention to designing reviews as they do to designing writing prompts.  

Review prompts shape how reviewers talk to writers, influencing the details reviewers notice and ignore. Prompts are not just words instructors use, but also the various forms of response they choose to help reviewers read a draft carefully and respond to it thoughtfully. 

Unhelpful feedback is often the result of reviewer insecurities, caused by many factors:

•     They don’t know how to talk about writing, generally.
•     They aren’t aware of the learning goals of a project, specifically.
•     They aren’t comfortable providing feedback to peers, especially friends.

When designing a review, there are three important factors we can take into account that will help overcome these obstacles and result in better feedback: we can consider the cognitive load of our reviews, start with pedagogical goals and design reviews backwards, and be detailed and specific in how we prompt students. 

I really like how this starts -- students can give good peer review feedback (the piece cites relevant empirical research showing as much) with coaching and guidance. And often that's not provided in peer review assignment design. And the second point --- review activities, to succeed, require as much attention, as writing assignments. 

Eli Review is a Web-based software platform for writing workshop pedagogy; it purposefully puts teachers in the role of guide on the side, with the only teacher-centered commenting space being in their revision plan tool. In that tool, students choose which written comments they'll follow in their revision; after choosing the comments and saying how they'll use them, the professor can comment on the revision plans. Professors do not comment on drafts, nor do they use Eli to grade (there's no grade book), the emphasis is on designing good reviews, coaching good feedback, and for professors, commenting on revision plans based on writers' decisions about classmates review comments. It's a dramatic shift.

But here's the thing, you do not have to teach or have colleagues teach with Eli Review to benefit from its advice on assigning good peer review assignments. The advice is simply smart no matter what tools you use for peer review. Here's another excerpt, this one elaborates on their observations about considering cognitive load:

 One mistake we often make is giving students too much to do. Asking reviewers to read too much text and address too many questions can often mean that they don’t have time to respond thoughtfully. Module 1 discussed the issue of time and feedback loops, but some specific strategies for reducing cognitive load on reviewers include. 

Review smaller texts - consider smaller, focused reviews as a text develops, rather than asking reviewers to digest and respond to a large text. In an example like this, writers get feedback early, on small pieces, helping make sure that the larger draft they’re building toward is on the right track, with the added benefit of making plagiarism much harder (since you can watch as a text evolves from earliest kernels to a full draft):
[image not shown]

Multiple reviews of the same text - Divide reviews to conquer cognitive load. Design smaller, swifter reviews that are focused on specific, granular goals. This will let reviewers focus carefully for discreet moves:  
[image not shown]

The advice to review smaller pieces of writing, smaller pieces of larger texts, or smaller goals in a larger text make incredible sense no matter how one does peer review.

Finally, because the writing is so clear, and the case for the approach so compelling, if you put into practice some of the strategies the piece suggests, no matter the technology you use, this is a piece worth assigning to your students before they begin doing peer review. It will help them to better understand your peer review approach, why you're asking them to do peer review, and it demonstrates convincingly that students can become reliably good peer reviewers.

#worthassigning: How to Write Effectively without Really Trying

This is cross-genre advice. Feel free to use these tips when sending memos to your supervisor, e-mailing colleagues, working with an author who needs some help, drafting a personal ad, and other places and times when writing makes a difference but you are really too busy to give it much thought.

1. E-Mail: End all e-mail with "Sent from my iPhone," or "Sent from Blackberry."  Research shows that readers of messages with those auto-added advertisements forgive grammar errors and typos more readily:  collision detection: Why people forgive your bad spelling in email "sent from my iPhone"
2. Georgia, Georgia, the whole document through, just an old sweet font, keep Georgia on your mind, for better grades.  How typeface influences the way we read and think - The Week
3. If page length matters . . . Triple Space! Graphics!: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html
4. Extortion, lying, and sudden endings: tips for getting readers to read: http://workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm

#worthassigning: Laura Hudson on Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All

If you go to http://twinery.org/ to learn about Twine, you get this:

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. 

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready. 

Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes. 

Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories. 

That's intriguing -- its open source, don't need to write any code, simple stories possible -- but it doesn't tell a story about what Twine can do.

Happily and wonderfully, very compassionately -- yes, a compassionate look at software -- Laura Hudson offers a wonderful profile of Twine by profiling a game developer who creates emotionally powerful and compelling games, a woman named Porpentine.

Here are some excerpts from Hudson's piece, just as a sampler of what makes her writing so good.

A free program that you can learn in one sitting, Twine also allows you to instantly publish your game so that anyone with a web browser can access it. The egalitarian ease of Twine has made it particularly popular among people who have never written a line of code — people who might not even consider themselves video-game fans, let alone developers.  

Chris Klimas, the web developer who created Twine as an open-source tool in 2009, points out that games made on it “provide experiences that graphical games would struggle to portray, in the same way books can offer vastly different experiences than movies do. It’s easy to tell a personal story with words.” 

Twine games look and feel profoundly different from other games, not just because they’re made with different tools but also because they’re made by different people — including people who don’t have any calcified notions about what video games are supposed to be or how they’re supposed to work. While roughly 75 percent of developers at traditional video-game companies are male, many of the most prominent Twine developers are women, making games whose purpose is to explore personal perspectives and issues of identity, sexuality and trauma that mainstream games rarely touch on.

And on Porpentine:

One of the most prominent and critically acclaimed Twine games has been Howling Dogs, a haunting meditation about trauma and escapism produced in 2012 by a woman named Porpentine. The gameplay begins in a claustrophobic metal room bathed in fluorescent light. Although you can’t leave, you can “escape” once a day by donning a pair of virtual-­reality goggles. Each time, you’re launched into a strange and lavishly described new world where you play a different role: a doomed young empress learning the art of dying; a scribe trying to capture the beauty of a garden in words; a Joan of Arc-like figure waiting to be burned on a pyre. And each time you return to the metal room, it’s a little dirtier and a little more dilapidated — the world around you slowly decomposing as you try to disappear into a virtual one. 

“When you have trauma,” Porpentine says, “everything shrinks to this little dark room.” While the immersive glow of a digital screen can offer a temporary balm, “you can’t stay stuck on the things that help you deal with trauma when it’s happening. You have to move on. You have to leave the dark room, or you’ll stay stunted.” 

When I first met Porpentine outside a coffee shop in Oakland, Calif., she was wearing a skirt and patterned knee socks, her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a small plastic barrette. We decided to head to a nearby park, and as we walked across the grass, she pivoted on one foot — an instant, unconscious gesture — and did a quick little spin in the sunshine. When we arrived at a park bench, one of the first things we talked about was trash, because her Twine games teem with it: garbage, slime and sludge, pooling and oozing through dystopian landscapes peopled by cyborgs, insectoid empresses and deadly angels. In Howling Dogs, the trash piles up sticky and slow; in other games, like All I Want Is for All of My Friends to Become Insanely Powerful, tar floods the room suddenly from an indistinct source. Forget pretty things, valuable things: Porpentine’s games are far more interested in what society discards as worthless. 

“Trash has very positive connotations in my world,” she said, trying to smooth the wild ends of her hair as the wind off a nearby lake kept bringing them to life. “A lot of my work is reclaiming that which has been debased.” A transgender woman who has faced harassment for much of her life, Porpentine referred to herself as “trash-bodied” several times as we talked. It’s not an insult, she explained: “Me and my friends, we hide in the trash. People call us trash, but we glorify in it.” At 14, she was kicked out of her home. It’s not an unusual story — an estimated 20 to 40 percent of homeless teenagers are gay, bisexual or transgender. When I asked her what she was doing before she made Twine games, she said, “Just surviving.”

Why I'd Assign This Piece as a Course Reading

What makes Hudson's piece compelling to read, and useful for thinking about as a teacher of writing, is that it accomplishes three distinct things, all signaled in her opening lines:

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “GamerGate,” the culture war that continues to rage within the world of video games, is the game that touched it off. Depression Quest, created by the developers Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler, isn’t what most people think of as a video game at all. For starters, it isn’t very fun. Its real value is as an educational tool, or an exercise in empathy.

Her piece touches on GamerGate, uses it as a reference and reminder. So that's the first thing it does, offers a commentary on the issues surrounding GamerGate. And she gets at that not by focusing on GamerGate per se, but on the platform and games women are writing. And it's that -- focusing the story on women writing games unique to gaming, where women make up 50% of gamers -- which comments on GamerGate. So the second accomplishment of her work is providing a deft understanding of Twine as a gaming platform. Why it's easy to use, how the ease-of-use opened up gaming to non-computer code trained developers. She doesn't write a tech manual on using Twine, but her descriptions of the games she's played, including many detailed scenes from Porpentine's games, illustrate how compelling and powerful Twine can be in creative hands. And third, her piece is about women who make games, and the kinds of games they are making, brought to life by her portrait of Porpentine.

Teasing out with writers how she structures her piece to reach these goals would be fun, but not necessary. Hudson's piece is an exercise in empathy, and for that alone it's worth assigning.

But it's also, in its way, a piece about the power of story. The games Hudson highlights, her portrait of Porpentine, reminded me of two works I love about the power of story. After reading about Porpentine, I couldn't help but think of this line from Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: “I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.”

Hudson's description of Porpentine's games, and Porpentine's own words, also put me in mind of Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck," which to me has always been about the point where words end and feeling/sensing begins, words carrying one to the point of immersion and deeper knowing. So the developers Hudson writes, "explore personal perspectives and issues of identity, sexuality and trauma." And the diver in Rich's poem explores as well:

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.

Writing in Twine

Hudson's piece is a great read -- lots to think about in English and writing classes, technology and culture courses, and can stand as course reading. But Twine is also a writing space, Hudson explains, "Twine games, they’re essentially nothing but words and hyperlinks; imagine a digital “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, with a dash of retro text adventures like Zork."

And so her piece is also an invitation to writing in Twine, an encouragement, even if never explicitly made.

Twine would be a great platform for having students write in.

I just came from a session at NCTE where the panelists spoke of the transitions teachers make from being students in teaching programs to being teachers. They spoke of the fear and anxiety new teachers face, the doubts, the challenges. One speaker, Audrey Lensmire, described group she formed, a kind of teacher support group for 6 women in her program who were out teaching. It began because the women would appear at her office, shut the door, and share. The teacher ed program lacked a course or space where teachers could talk about the mental and emotional strains of teaching. Many of the women in Audrey's group also carried the burden of mental health issues they recognized in themselves or were being treated for. But until they got in the group and could talk about this, they carried that burden alone.

I am also thinking of Twine and Lensmire's work with the work Margaret Price did in her book, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life,  The book, to quote from a review by Stephanie Kerschbaum,  "reveals how individuals with what she terms mental disabilities—which she defines broadly to include not only intellectual and developmental disabilities, but also autism, learning disabilities, and psychosocial disabilities and mental illnesses—are persistently excluded, ignored, and targeted in higher education."

Playing Twine games composed by artists such as Porpentine can be a powerful empathetic experience, just as hearing Audrey Lensmire and her colleagues today was powerful. Or just as reading Margaret Price, Melanie Yergeau, Adrienne Rich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and today, Laura Hudson, is powerful.

I wonder: what would a game in Twine about teaching look like, if Audrey Lensmire's group were to write one, and how would the writing of the game change their view of  themselves as teachers? What would Melanie Yergeau, who does great work in digital media and disability studies, who writes compellingly and unflinchingly about autism, compose?

It's not that these people -- Melanie Yergeau, the women in Audrey Lensmire's group, Margaret Price -- need to nor have to use Twine. But their work looks at the kinds of issues that many Twine game developers explore, and so I cannot help wonder what composing in Twine might bring to those whom their work supports. They are all women scholars who, while they ground their work in theory and the relevant literature, give voice to what's often unsaid, through the personal stories that also permeate their work.

And it's not that the Twine pieces we ask students to write, or maybe write ourselves, have to explore the inner emotional and cognitive worlds Margaret, Audrey, and Melanie share explore and share. Twine simply looks to be an intriguing platform for digital composition, where many courses use games or explore their creation. Twine can be a tool where different writing assignments, different writers, will bring to it their own purposes, their own maps.

#worthassigning Feedback and Revision: The Key Components of Powerful Writing Pedagogy

Peer Feedback and Why it Matters for, and Leads to, Better Revision

Eli Review begins a new professional development series with a wonderfully smart piece called "Feedback and Revision: The Key Components of Powerful Writing Pedagogy" at http://elireview.com/content/td/feedback/. Eli Review, and this article, is powered by the minds and experience of expert teachers and accomplished composition researchers, Jeff Grabill and Bill Hart-Davidson, and a protege graduate student of theirs, Mike McLeod.

While their piece is pitched to faculty, and is excellent for graduate teaching associates taking a writing and teaching of writing course, or for learning center or writing center tutors, or to introduce powerful peer review and revision strategies to faculty via WAC programs or centers for teaching and learning, it is also the kind of thing I'd assign to students, even the most novice of them, as well.

The piece is structured as six part module:

1. Helpful Feedback Fuels Learning
2. Revision Leads to Better Writing
3. What Feedback Is and How to Teach It
4. Teaching Revision: The Basic Moves
5. But I don’t have time! 
6. Discussion, Resources, and Next Steps

The first five parts include short videos that punctuate the text, which is engagingly written, not overly jargoned, The piece is simply friendly and encouraging. It makes getting better revision seem possible, not insurmountable.

Though for teachers, with an implicit focus on classroom assignments and contexts, the insights on feedback apply to tutors, especially in writing and learning centers that might also do small group work, where tutors help coach writers to give feedback.  It's worth assigning to students because it makes accessible the research and theory behind asking students to do peer feedback, something they're often reluctant to do. By making clear the connection of feedback to revision, and revision to growth as a writer, and revision as more than just surface edits, the piece helps teach novice writers the value of the doing peer review, of giving it as well as getting it.

This kind of insight into the reasons for requiring peer feedback, for valuing it, for doing it early and often, helps students buy into doing it. Remember, it's not easy to learn to give good feedback, and it takes students time to learn how to use feedback and how to trust feedback from their peers. Eli Review, as a product does more than any product I know to help that learning, build that trust. But even if you're not using Eli, the insights and discussion will  help you get students to giving, listening to, and revising more fully from peer review. So it's worth assigning.

To help with assigning to students, to make this something you can better use either to introduce feedback and revision or as part of any course with writing¹, here are variations on Eli's questions for discussion that you can use with students:

1.     In the past, how has feedback helped you make decide what kinds of changes to make in your writing, learning, or other goals such as getting better at sport, or cooking or dancing or some other pursuit? How will feedback help you achieve the learning goals you set for this course?
2.     Have you ever given someone feedback, advice, help of any kind and then thought to yourself, hey, that's a good idea, I'll try it myself? If you give writing feedback to a classmate that's really useful to them, do you think it might also be useful to you, or based on something that was useful to you?
3.     Writing is part of this course, and our goal in revising based on peer feedback is in part to teach you all how to get and give feedback on your own. What role does writing play in other courses you have, and how might feedback play a role in learning in those courses?
4.     How might your learning about writing change, learning about yourself as a writer, if you had data on the usefulness of the feedback you gave, a record of what feedback you found useful, and reflective revision plans that show how you made used the feedback you received? 

1.  If you're teaching a first year writing course based on Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle's Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning "First-Year Composition" as "Introduction to Writing Studies" , the Eli piece is useful for introducing some of the research and practices behind peer review and revision. See also Doug's and Liz's Writing About Writing.

#worthassigning: Matt Reed on the tensions caused by loss of local faculty governance

Matt Reed, who writes the Confessions of a Community College Dean blog at Inside Higher Ed, has a post up that traces the shifts in decision making on policies and curriculum in higher education, a shift that's veering away from faculty governance/local control.

The post is at https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/bossypants-conundrum

Here's an excerpt:

In many ways, higher education’s mode of production is still artisanal. Each professor sets her own standards for grading, selects her own materials, and to a significant extent reigns supreme in the classroom.  The apprentice-journeyman-master structure of grad school makes some sense in the context of an artisanal model. The artisanal model has its own dogma, in which academic freedom and shared governance are supposed to ensure that the artisans are substantially left alone.  As with any working dogma, it has its own internal contradictions -- shared governance can work against the autonomy of dissenters, for example, which is why dysfunctional department meetings are endemic to the industry -- but it has held up for long enough that some people think it’s natural.

Over time, the economic limitations of the artisanal model led to a wave of unionization based on the industrial model.  Unionization had clear benefits, although it introduced a whole new set of tensions.  For example, the artisanal ideal that every professor is a special snowflake sits uneasily alongside payscales determined solely by seniority.  “Master” status relies on being somehow special; collective bargaining relies on solidarity.  And the boundaries between curricular decisions, which are subject to shared governance, and economic decisions, which are subject to collective bargaining, aren’t always clear.  Is program elimination curricular or economic?  (The correct answer is “yes.”)  Still, to the extent that the unionization drive reinforced the artisanal ideal of faculty being substantially left alone, most of the contradictions could be contained.

Now a new logic is emerging, and it’s bringing new tensions.  State governments, often following initiatives from national foundations, are starting to look more intentionally at community and state colleges as branches of state workforce development systems.  In so doing, they’re working to shift the locus of decision-making from the campus, where shared governance remains the preferred method of decision-making, to the state.

I recommend the link for the full context. 

Why is this a piece worth assigning?

The changes Reed describes, even if you don't agree with his description of them or if what he says isn't true for you locally, are broadly true that the analysis is useful. The piece will be useful especially for graduate students to read, as they begin their careers and need to think strategically about where they want to be in ten and twenty years. It's a hard thing to do, think ahead about where a career in learning and teaching will go, but as tenure and full-time positions are already being reduced, it's also the new reality. 

The skill sets that most current faculty needed and used to get jobs still apply, but onto that, adjuncts and graduate students and newly hired assistant professors, need to develop other skills, and will need to be ready to adapt to conditions that most of their graduate school mentors cannot imagine. Newly minted or early career faculty in traditional programs will need to do the traditional things -- publish, present at conferences, serve on committees -- but they'll also need to be ready to shift gears if their programs are cut, or colleges are reorganized, or simply because opportunities for full time work that do not emerge in traditional colleges might be found in nontraditional programs.

What's also true is that new models of teaching are emerging, ones that are clearly not artisinal. Competency based education programs (see shar.es/10oyYn for new programs announced at public colleges)  -- where entire degrees and certificates are offered -- often do not follow an artisanal model at all. Faculty roles are unbundled -- curriculum and course design is separated out from leading discussion, giving feedback to students on their work, tutoring, and mentoring. In that world, what will professional development look like?

Will the raw numbers of traditional faculty roles in traditional colleges and campuses remain steady, either as adjuncts or full-time tenured artisans,  and will competency based programs, or badging programs, or other alternative educational ecosystems  simply emerge side by side, creating an alternate higher ed universe? Or will competing models merge, will institutions become hybrid, and faculty roles hybrid?

If faculty lead hybrid lives -- doing some artisanal course sections on brick and mortar campus where they design the curriculum and buttress their choices with academic freedom, but also serve on a curriculum review/design board for a competency based program, are hired to design a course for continuing education, or teach as learning coach in an online degree program -- what does that mean for their professional identity, how their work is valued, how promotions and pay increases are determined?

#worthassigning: Mark Bernstein on Notetaking

Some of you will remember, or perhaps still use, Storyspace, software that EastGate released for creating hypertext fiction. If you're not familiar, the import of Storyspace, via a discussion of Michael Joyce's _Afternoon, A Story_, is described in a 1992 NY Times Book Review piece called "The End of Books" by Robert Coover (http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html).

Bernstein's current project, which grew out of academics trying to use Storyspace for note taking and information organizing instead of post-modern fiction, is Tinderbox.  From chapter one of his book, The Tinderbox Way, which is both a user manual and a meditation on the value of systemic note taking, Bernstein describes the software this way:

Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. Its meant to help, to facilitate. Its not a methodology or a code. Its a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. Its a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence.

I pulled the quote above from Sources and Methods #5: Mark Bernstein, a fascinating podcast interview with Bernstein conducted by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Matt Trevithick. The interview runs about an hour, but below the podcast recording, you'll see a time line, indicating at what minutes in the discussion different topics arose. The full interview is worth a listen for context and continuity.

Here's an excerpt from that timeline to give you both a sense of the conversation, and how the timeline helps you to find key areas to return to:

8:54 - Idea: Discovering the structure information should take is the essence of what research is about.

13:14 - Idea: Agile software development has come into force more recently, rather than structuring all the rules first. Writing the software and then revising the software - where most of what you do is editing, rather than designing and debugging - has been extremely fruitful, and has gone in just 10-15 years gone from outlying heresy to the dominant paradigm of software development today. [Note: Bernstein goes on to describe how Agile software resembles writing prose.]

15:08 - Idea: When you’re writing, you’re talking to yourself, or rather to the page. When you write, you are meeting minds on the screen, and in fact one of those minds is a manifestation of ourselves.

20:38 - Idea: People don’t like to think about their process of writing. We have this essentially romantic conception of idea generation writing, that it’s essentially inspiration, and it should come to you in a flash, and that it’s mystical, and that it’s based in someway on your innate goodness, and therefore people don’t spend much time thinking about how to improve because you can’t improve on your own innate goodness.

There's a lot in the discussion that maps on to teaching writing, teaching research, teaching thinking, and faculty development for those professors who want to help students get better at writing, research, and thinking. 

The interview can be assigned in time points for students, or one might scroll to to a point and play a snippet as a way to launch a discussion. For students especially, this discussion focuses on the role of noting, of seeing and recording, and in the act of doing so, of thinking, organizing, and finding order. 

In a way, it's about slowing down, of taking the time to start a system that will serve a learner as a writer, and over time, as they change as writers, learn more, know more, and will find it more and more useful to be able to go back into their reading and writing history to recall, reorganize, and rethink, note taking as a key element for revision.

#worthassigning -- 3 essays on rape and death threats against women in the age of #gamergate

Online violence against women scares and worries me. As it morphs from virtual threat, which is bad enough and still violent even if not overtly physical, into offline threats that drive women from their homes, offices, and families and into hiding, the damage and danger has become palpable enough to make news.

Writing in her Washington Post Blog, Act Four, Alyssa Rosenberg sums up the three high profile cases:

[Anita] Sarkeesian has had to leave her home because someone who threatened her claimed to have her address and that of her parents. Brianna Wu, who co-founded the video gaming company Giant Spacekat, also moved to avoid threats made in response not even to sustained criticism of video games, but to jokes she made about the Gamergate campaign. “Depression Quest” developer Zoe Quinn went into hiding after a vengeful ex-boyfriend published a long account of her alleged infidelities that seemed to imply she chose her partners for professional advancement.

These women's stories are in the news now, coming shortly after a spring and summer that brought much needed attention to campus sexual assaults and the lack of protections and justice most of its victims endure. It seems to me, then, a look at the issue of virtual assault having devastating consequences in physical world, can also increase understanding and shed light on campus sexual assault.

To that end, here are three pieces on virtual assault that I recommend and would assign. Note, these are frank discussions and long pieces. But they're compelling.

A Rape in Cyberspace

I'd start with Julian Dibbell's "A Rape in Cyberspace," available online at his http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/

A version Dibbell's essay first appeared in the Village Voice in 1993. That's right, twenty years ago. Dibbell's piece focuses on how a violent virtual rape in LambdaMOO, a text based virtual world where rooms, characters, spaces and actions are all described in words that allowed players to enter, create avatars, and interact, shocked those LambdaMOO members into realizing they were a community. The article describes how the victim of the rape, though virtual, suffered physically -- fear, anxiety, tears. While the community recognized the rape as an assault, they realized there was nothing they could do to punish the perpetrator in real life, no way to bring charges, to get an arrest. And so they develop rules to try to deal with future actions virtually, by setting up guidelines for expelling offenders from the Moo.

I'd start with this piece for a few reason. It's one of the first, perhaps the first, documented case study of cyber rape and its affects. Unlike the underbelly of the contemporary accounts of virtual sexual assault under consideration in the next two pieces, the rapist didn't have recourse to comrades, drum up justification that blamed the woman he assaulted, or wage the assault in multiple sites and social networks. The rape happened in a relatively small and closed community, a community that became more formally formed in response to the rape, and because it was small, was able to adopt more quickly rules and policies to better protect members.

Why the Trolls Will Always Win

First published by Kathy Sierra at her own blog as "Trouble at the Koolaid Point," Wired Magazine republished her original post verbatim just days later with the title "Why the Trolls Will Always Win," and that's the version I link to here: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/trolls-will-always-win/. I'm opting for Wired because Sierra indicates that she might at some point take her original post down.

But off the bat, a first question for students to consider -- how does the different title give by Wired shape their reading?

Sierra's piece marks the tenth year anniversary of her first online threat, of which, Sierra writes, "I thought it was a one-off, then. Just one angry guy. . . .  But looking back, it was the canary in the coal mine…". What's changed? Sierra's work picks up from the one angry guy, the kind of person the LambdaMOO community faced, to a world where social networking -- Twitter, especially in her personal experience -- amplifies and spreads the assault against a lone woman exponentially, as trolls amplify, get picked up, facts are ignored, lies are believed. She explains:

I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed.
[. . .]
But the Koolaid-Point-driven attacks are usually started by (speculating, educated guess here, not an actual psychologist, etc) sociopaths. They’re doing it out of pure malice, “for the lulz.” And those doing it for the lulz are masters at manipulating public perception. Master trolls can build an online army out of the well-intended, by appealing to The Cause (more on that later). The very best/worst trolls can even make the non-sociopaths believe “for the lulz” is itself a noble cause.

Sierra describes first what her experience tells her about the logic and motivation of trollers and then why and when she stepped back from online life -- how she was harrassed out, and why, with this post, she is stepping back in.

The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It's Gamergate

Written by Kyle Wagner in Deadspin, this piece (http://goo.gl/5yWvnL), published Tuesday, October 14, begins with the news that Brianna Wu fled her Boston home over the weekend, "after an online stalker vowed to rape and kill her."

Wagner does three very useful things.

1. He explains the origin of #gamergate, a movement that claims to be about holding the press who cover the gaming industry to journalistic ethics, but that began with a deranged ex-lovers lies and rants about Wu Zoe Quinn, including the false claim that her romance with a journalist lead to a game she wrote being praised.
2. He critiques the coverage of #gamergate in the traditional press, The New York Times and the like, noting that their instance on even handedness creates what press critics have called false equivalence, a logical fallacy. Such coverage lends undo legitimacy to those who committing the assaults.
3. This is key, Wagner describes the mindset of the trollers and assaulters, why they feel aggrieved enough to do this, and he likens it the kind of motivations that drive certain segments of the Tea Party and other reactionary groups: change they don't like is coming. For some in the Tea Party, its the recognition, embodied in our first black President, that the nation's demographics are changing and that whites will become a minority.  For those in gamergate, its a reaction against the fact that more and more women play games, and that new games are emerging designed to appeal to those players. 

What Can One Learn From These?

Taken together these three essays move both historically and technologically. Dibbell's piece sets an early example, when the Web was young and new and a smaller place; Sierra's first person account gives voice to a victim of assault and violence in her own terms, introducing and explaining terms and techniques that show the role of social networks in turning the derangement of a lone actor into a a deranged and even more dangerous mob; and Wagner's work takes a step back, offering scathing attack on Wu's assailants and their motivations, and then tying it to a larger cultural trend.

Combined, these are long reads, but as I said, compelling. Each is written in Web vernacular, each is frank, each has its own truths to convey. I like them because they are one-sided, advocate for women and for a civil online social communities, even as the work by Sierra and Wagner show how difficult that goal is. I also think they bring forth the physical and psychological cost of assault, how the relentless nature of these kinds of attacks, have consequences in the offline world. This is not a painless crime, not just words.

And finally, they pieces shed light on the anger and entitlement mindsets of the attackers. So those insights, empathy for the attacked and anger and hate of the attackers, can provide some grounding for a discussion of campus sexual violence.