Searching for the Holy Grail of Analytical Writing (or just a shard will do)
More than teaching history my job is to teach writing. In order to learn history, a written discipline, students must learn how to read and think critically and then translate those thinking skills into written expression to share with one another. This is no small potatoes for anyone, let alone students with as many pressures as my students seem to have. In my experience my best teachers were those who taught me something without me knowing, sometimes, so deftly that I thought I did it all myself. They they just set up the room in a way that I had to learn something new before I left. So how do I teach writing history in a way that might put students more at ease, make them more inclined to write with more depth and try out new skills, in an environment that they feel at home in? I'm thinking that social media might be the logical place to expand what I already do in the classroom and help deepen my evolving online course. How can the confines of 140 characters make for succinct, clear writing? How can blog posts fit in to encourage students to pre-write their essays? How might timelines help students organize their thoughts before writing? How can bookmarking tools help students with research? How can informal writing help to introduce students to academic inquiry, help instill curiosity, make students take their thoughts to a new place?
For the next four weeks, as a member of an online class of community college faculty looking at the pedagogical uses of social media, I'll evaluate how well-established web-based tools that connect people in various ways, might be used to help students learn how to analyze and write history.
Before I begin, I want to say that I'm skeptical. The technology that supports social media does not create analytical thinkers. It's a "garbage in, garbage out" kind of situation, but my skepticism does not keep me from getting pretty excited about the potential. I'm looking forward to taking a look at the structures of writing and connecting that social media tools offer and applying them directly into the teaching of historical writing. We'll see what we get!
