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last.updated 6.3.12

Teaching Writing Online, Part 2

Purpose

We will continue to discuss Scott Warnock's book, Teaching Writing Online: How & Why, focusing on its usefulness for preparing writing instructors to teach writing with the technologies available in 2010. As a result, you will get the opportuity to approach this book as both a scholar and a practioner.

Instructional Tool Review

Cheri will be presenting their instructional tool reviews and fielding questions.

Freewrite I–I, Publisher

For ten minutes address the following prompt:

What are specific features of Warnock's book that make it useful for writing instructors teaching from a distance in 2010? Also, Warnock, like most authors, probably had some constraints on producing this book. What would you have liked to have seen covered or developed that was not? For some of you, other ways to think about this question is if he was writing for a more advanced audience, what should he cover, or how would you write this book?

Activity–Making the pitch

In the following groups, you will have 45 minutes to compose a 200-500 word pitch using Google Documents to a publisher (like NCTE) on a book that will compete with Warnock's praxis-oriented text about teaching writing online. In this pitch, you will want to explain the book's audience, purpose, what will make your book distinguishable from other books on the market (note that I understand you have limited time, so this can be based upon the assigned scholarship you have read, what you have read for your blogs, and generally anything you have come across as teacher of online classes).

Discussion I –Teaching Writing Online

We will discuss the following questions:

• What questions do you have about Warnock's book?
• What pedagogical philosophy about teaching and teaching writing is Warnock using as the foundation for this book?
• What is your opinion of Warnock's book?
• If you were Warnock's publisher what would you want to see him do with this text?

Discussion II–Applying Teaching Writing Online

Based upon Warnock's book, your experiences over the last week, and a healthy understanding of good pedagogy, how would you revise the design of the synchronous class activities in Google Docs and the asynchronous class? <This discussion is not meant to prompt anyone to fawn over the instructor's brilliance–as if this is even the case–rather it is an opportunity for you to apply Warnock's principles and critically analyze a real distance education situation>.