In my second session with Mark Moritz’s Anthropology 620 class, we talked about developing a style manual for the wiki that the students were contributing to during the quarter. (more…)

I had the pleasure this quarter of working with Professor Mark Moritz and his Anthropology 620 class. Dr. Moritz centered his class writing assignments on producing a wiki on the topic of the class, which was hunter-gatherer societies. I came into the class twice, and I’ll divide my comments for each session into two posts. The first session addressed how wikis might fit into disciplinary attitudes toward writing and knowledge production. (more…)

This Halloween workshop, “Plagiarism Doesn’t Have to Be Scary”, was an exploration of the broad contexts of ethics and writing in disciplinary courses. I thought about convincing some of my staff to dress up as “plagiarizing zombies” that we could vanquish at the beginning of the workshop. Thankfully, I thought better of it. Or maybe I just chickened out. (more…)

Since we have a lot to say on this topic, I’m going to divide our summary of the workshop on this into two posts, beginning with my introductory remarks, and then following with an overview of what was shared by our guest presenters, Vicki Daiello from the Department of Art Education and Professor Scott Dewitt of the Department of English. (more…)

How can I get students to comment on each other’s work more effectively?

Peer response can be a very effective way of getting students to engage in each others’ writing and to be more reflective about their own writing. However, it can sometimes be difficult to get students to move beyond generic comments like “It flows” and “I like it.” In order to make your students’ peer responding as effective as it can be, consider the following strategies: (more…)