CCR Instructor Blog

This post comes out of my very real gratitude for our amazing staff of student tech workers here at Stanford CCR: shown here hard at work prepping for a video conference, Jonathan, Anya and Eethar are all now in their second year working with our project, supporting the video conferences, and every day I am grateful for their help.

We didn't always have student tech support -- while our Stanford Tech Guru, Bob Smith, has always been on hand to help us out with our connections, for several years, Alyssa and I have balanced the logistics of curricular planning with the hands-on reality of hooking up wires, checking for hot ethernet ports, troubleshooting bad network connections, solving echo problems, realigning webcams -- all the very necessary work that goes into trying to create a "transparent" tech interface for our students to use in talking with their globally distributed partners. And, in fact, ironically, despite our strong student staff, some of our connections this quarter are completely UN-supported for the very first time (because of scheduling conflicts), leaving the instructor to field the tech issues him/herself during the session. Of course, this is the situation that many of our partners face every time they connect with us: we know that many schools that we work with DON'T have any infrastructure to support video conferencing and that it is in fact the teachers who are managing the tech aspect of things on their own.

It occurs to me that we need to think hard about the tech requirements of participating in a video conference exchange. As much as we try to streamline participation in the project, what level of tech expertise is still necessary on the part of the instructor? And what is the base level of buy-in needed from the university's tech support structure to make these connections work? How can we best facilitate these exchanges from a logistical point of view, both for those with tech workers, and those without?

I'd be interested in your ideas about this issue!

Posted by Christine Alfano at 02:13 PM | Permalink

Even though classes at Stanford University don't begin for another month, the CCR team is always looking to the future. In addition to lining up CCR video-conference and blog connections for the 2009-2010 academic year, CCR has just launched a new research collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin.

This is thanks to Sean McCarthy, Assistant Instructor and Assistant Director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab within the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Sean attended our CCR panel at 4C’s in March on "Cross-cultural Perspectives on Technology-enabled Learning in the Global Writing Classroom." He then wrote to us interested in introducing CCR as a core project for one of his research groups at UT Austin this year. We were thrilled to meet Sean at 4C’s, and now, we are even more excited at the prospect of a year rich in research collaboration.

In our kick-off Marratech planning session yesterday, Sean introduced his colleagues and fellow assistant directors Molly Hardy and Justin Tremel, who sat in on the video-conference meeting.

Together, we discussed shared goals and made plans. This is an exciting opportunity to see how the CCR methodology can “transfer” to other universities and institutions. The whole point of our original WGLN grant-funded research was to develop a protocol and concrete practices that could be utilized by many in higher education. While we have enjoyed success in sharing the CCR knowledge and know-how with our active international partners, this is the first time that a peer institution in America seeks to study, learn, apply, and extend the research methodology, working practices, and knowledge developed by the CCR team in 4 years of research and sustained practice. At the same time, CCR will have a lot to learn from UT Austin as they have the technological resources and the researcher-teachers who can extend CCR methods to the next level, trying out new platforms for connectivity and investigating new research questions. Our ultimate goal will be a shared publication about this collaborative process, this cross-institutional shared research endeavor.

Tomorrow, Sean will pitch the CCR focus as one of the Core Research Projects to the graduate students and faculty – we are grateful for this endeavor, and we look forward to meeting his colleagues, working with them, learning from them and alongside them, this coming academic year!

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

A dream has come true! Students in our classes can now enjoy guest lectures and workshops from artists and other creative leaders in the field who we beam in through our Marratech video-conference technology.

Thanks to a grant from SICA, or the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts for innovations in Curriculum and Pedagogy, we were able to set up an entire series of workshops for students in our PWR 1 and PWR 2 classes.

John Paval, a Stanford alum and professional communication coach, led several virtual classes through CCR video-conference technology, focusing, for instance on Oratory for Leadership. One of his video-conference workshops took place during the visit by our colleagues from Uppsala University, who had a chance to sit in and see first-hand how we can expand learning for our students with virtual lectures. Then, John Paval came to visit Stanford in person and led additional sessions with our students.

The SiCA grant also made possible a virtual workshop with Steve Bodow, senior comedy writer for The Daily Show. We had quite a packed house in the Writing Center for this special curricular opportunity - including Helle's students and many lecturers attending.

In addition, we had fabulous interactive class lectures by Dr. Bump Halbritter on sound and cinema, and a stand-up comedy workshop by sportswriter comidienne Julie Kicklighter.

The end of Spring brought the good news that SICA awarded CCR a new grant for 2009-2010 which will make possible more video-conferences, virtual guest lectures, and - in a new development - student showcases of work produced collaboratively through this exciting opportunity for global connection.

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The image above is from a field trip our "Rhetoric of Consumer Culture" class took to the Stanford Shopping Center. Students broke into groups, did rhetorical analysis of storefronts, developed hypotheses about who would shop there and how they would shop, observed the stores to see who actually shopped there and how, and reported their results. They were able to apply what they were learning in the classroom directly to another learning experience that was quite different.

According to students, this desire to try new experiences and to put their learning to use in new ways is also at play in the CCR workshops. The cross cultural exhchange is a lively and active learning experience. As one student reported, "When I told my friend that we were doing workshops with a class in Sweden, she was jealous. She said, 'You mean you actually do something in your PWR class?'"

By "doing something" she probably means that, in addition to learning about rhetoric and research (which happens in all PWR classes), students are getting a chance to convert their learning almost immediately into an active process that is taking place beyond the classroom.

I am noticing how at ease Christine Alfano is at setting up the technology and working with dozens of variables in getting ready for our workshops. She and Alyssa O'Brien are working with hours and hours of experience now, and this expertise is creating an atmosphere in which students can experiment, be social with their CCR exchange partners, and learn the work of their classes in new ways. Anders Eriksson appears remarkably relaxed there on the other side of the world as he says hello and starts the sessions. This comfortable, human quality sets the tone for, as the student's friend says, "Doing something."

Continue reading "New Learning Experiences: "Doing Something"" »

Posted by John Peterson, Stanford at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April, a time for new growth and the end of winter bringing about fruits and bloom. Here in CCR, we are seeing the fruits of much hard work: The core team has been on the conference path, speaking and publishing about the work (more on that in another entry). Thanks to Chris Alfano's hard work and Bob Smith's creative solutions, here at Stanford were are finally building a technology-space infrastructure, while in Orebro Eva and Stefan have opened their new Rhetoric Room (the second one!)

We've also launched our video conferences for Spring. This quarter, we will be holding videoconferences nearly every Monday and Wednesday. It's incredibly busy but very rewarding. Our TA from the Master's Program in Technology, Design, and Learning, Evelyn Kung, will be offering weekly reports on these video conferences with the goal of helping us improve our ICT-pedagogy and curriculum implementation. Look for her reports in the comments to these entries and also in periodic synthesis reports.

Anders and Alyssa are developing a curriculum in cross-cultural rhetoric to be shared with other institutions and departments, so their classes are working on new, shared assignments, activities, and goals. Anders and John Peterson are holding three consecutive workshops to foster global learning. We also hope to hold video conferences with our colleagues in Egypt and Australia, with Chris's class, Helle's class, and Sangeeta's class. At this point, there is more demand than we can handle but that is a sign of growth, for sure.

Here's a photo of instructors John Peterson and Alyssa O'Brien debriefing with Anders Eriksson in Sweden after today's video conference on advertisements and cross-cultural rhetoric. As you can see from the whiteboard, the students were busy creating hybrid compositions -- and as they will all be posting on the CCR main blog, they will be participating in writing as an iterative process, with a dialogic feedback loop. It's very exciting!

We have much more to share in this instructor's blog so I will be back soon to revise it or add to it!

Alyssa

Posted by Alyssa O'Brien at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)