MOOCs, Mentor Texts, and "Motivation Makes"

This blog showcases  students' work they did at the beginning of the semester. I wanted students to immediately create ("make") something textual. 

As it was our first lab session, I wanted to find a safe way for them to express themselves. I also wanted students, when they likely felt hyped about school, to find ways to keep themselves motivated when the going got tough. 

So I decided to hack the "make cycles" from The Writing Thief MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), a digital learning community devoted to investigating Ruth's Culham's The Writing Thief. Culham's text supports writing teachers who use mentor texts to model writing craft for their students. What better way to promote effective writing than to have developing writers observe, identify, and emulate the moves they encounter in the texts they read. 

The "make cycles"  are activities which . . . "encourage participants to interact with the text and with each other as we discuss and implement ideas for  'using mentor texts to teach the craft of writing'" (source). The digital sharing and feedback that comes from "MOOC-ing" also helps us experiment with "connected learning." 

Reflecting on Problem-Solving: Six Word Memoirs

A couple days into a challenging project this semester, students  felt confused, unclear. They didn't want guidance or coaching.  They wanted me to tell them exactly what to do. Students wanted, no demanded,  an absolute, singular correct solution to the challenge. 

This push back didn't surprise me. The majority were first-year college students. And returning students also argued for a more mechanistic, formulaic prompt of the worksheet or five-paragraph format variety. More comfortable filling in the blanks or following a rote formula, students froze when given a task calling for higher order thinking.  

The Writing Thief: Stolen Quotes + Depth of Knowledge

I recently wrote a post about joining a MOOC sponsored by the San Diego Area Writing Project. We're reading Ruth Culham's The Writing Thief: Using Mentor Texts to Teach the Craft of Writing, and our second "making project" is to find a quote from her book that resonates with us. Using a digital tool of our choice, we areto bring that quote to life, expressing how Culham's words affect us. The clip above is my contribution. 

I used PowerPoint to recite Culham's words. I didn't list them in order or use the whole passages where the quotes appeared. I sampled them, selecting, repeating, splicing and sequencing her sentences into something a little bit more poetry. 

I wanted to create a meditative, playful effect, taking advantage the images Culham's words conjured for me. I chose the images Flickr's "free-to-use" website. This was my first time using Flicker, and I enjoyed hunting for evocative images.