Ms E-Mentor

It has come to this.  I’m blogging about marking.  Our new semester of teaching starts this coming week so normal service will be resumed soon and I will start talking about the online component on my 3rd Year undergraduate module on Fin de Siècle Writing and Culture.  In the meantime, I’ve spent much of January writing an essay for my MA and … marking.

The marking that I’m focussing on here is the marking of the discussion forum activities that took place on my Victorians module in Semester One.   Sometimes colleagues of mine in English Departments have wondered whether it is possible (or indeed desirable) to assess online discussion.  I have become quite a proponent of assessing such work for two main reasons: (1) assessing online discussion values the work students are putting in to online activities (and if they’re anything like mine, many will be putting in a lot of work), and (2) you will ensure 100% participation, across the entire course.  Some colleagues reading this may say they have highly motivated students who don’t need the ’stick’ of assessment to get them to participate in such activities.  If so, then good for you, although I am still a tad sceptical as to whether all students will participate across an entire course in such circumstances.  My assessment criteria aim to provide many ‘carrots’ in terms of motivating my students in terms of their online work, and it is my experience (after about 5 years of assessing online discussion) that many students will work really hard at online activities.

My marking of what my students have posted in discussion forums over the course of a semester doesn’t involve any kind of electronic mechanisms:  I basically look at the posts each student has posted (our VLE enables me to ’sort by author’ for each discussion forum) and assess the quality of what’s there against my assessment criteria.  Soon I get a feel for a particular student’s standard, as ranged against everything else I’m looking at (as one does with a batch of essays).  As I read their posts I make brief notes for myself as to what they are doing well/not doing so well.  My feedback form is simple:  it lists the number of discussion forums the student took part in across the semester, and then I offer my comments and a grade.

When I have visited other English Departments in the UK to ‘demo’ my VLE activities I am often asked how long such marking takes.  Overall I would say it is quicker than marking the equivalent number of essays, not least because I don’t write comments on forum postings as one writes on an essay.  My assessment criteria are also often popular with colleagues.  In the forthcoming Guide to Good Practice in the Use of Discussion Activities in English (HEA English Subject Centre, 2010 — see my Ms E-Mentor ‘Publications, Presentations and Awards’ page on this blog)  I have written the ‘Assessment’ chapter and the assessment criteria I use are set out there.  They probably aren’t perfect, but they work for me, and have been ‘tweaked’ over the years to try and iron out loopholes (students are very good at finding these, intentionally or not).  At best, the marking of the online work is really enjoyable, because I see students putting in a huge amount of effort and commitment to the activities, and responding with intelligence and flair.  Although I do look at what is going on in the forums as they are happening, and as the term progresses, I don’t make any claims (either to my class or to myself) to look at everything at that time.  When I come to mark I do aim to look at every post made, and there are always new things that surprise and impress me.

They need it more than we do: http://www.dec.org.uk/donate_now/

Now the snow has gone, Ms E-Mentor has decided to crawl out of her carefully-crafted igloo.  Actually it’s melted, but all in all what this partly adds up to is that there are not a lot of e-learning things going on at the moment because it’s our end-of-semester marking period, and Semester Two’s teaching has yet to start. 

So this gives me an excuse to drift off topic and talk about what I did over New Year, which was go to London.  I love London.  It is one of the most amazing cities in the world.  As I did my PhD there (Birkbeck College, University of London) I still know some of the centre of London well enough to be able to wander around with only the occasional nod to my A-Z.  The heading of this post is the start of a famous quote by Samuel Johnson (1709-84): “You find no man [or woman, Sam], at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London.  No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”.  Absolutely, absolutely. 

We were staying in Bloomsbury very near Marchmont Street, which is a terrific neighbourhood if you don’t know it.  One of the many delights of this street is a secondhand bookshop of great magnitude: Judd Books.  We wandered into Judd Books on our way to an exhibition;  well over an hour later and about £200 pounds lighter we then staggered back to the hotel with a shed load of bargains.  A good secondhand bookshop is a place of immense stimulation and satisfaction and Judd Books is up there with the best London has to offer in my opinion for an all-round, intellectually satisying collection.  They also give a 10% discount to students. 

The exhibition was “Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill”, on at the Royal Academy until 24th January 2010.  Being a bit of a Victorianist by background, I’ve just belatedly been getting into modernism in a big way via my MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Manchester Metropolitan University.  

Jacob Epstein, "Rock Drill" (1913-15)

 I have seen some of Eric Gill’s sculpture before, but not extensively that of Epstein or Gaudier-Brzeska.  The Epstein room is dominated by the extraordinary, huge, human-machine phallicly straddling its machinery that is Rock Drill (1913-15).  I’ve just looked in the accompanying catalogue and find, to my surprise, that Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery own this.  Never seen it on display there.  It’s an astonishingly powerful piece of work.  It was one of the first pieces of sculpture ever to incorporate a piece of machinery into itself, and its sense of menace seems absolutely of its moment as the First World War is breaking out. But the figure too launched a thousand action movie heroes’ get-up: Robocop and Batman, you’re nothing new. 

I could go on for a long time about London.  We were there on Blackfriars Bridge at midnight (along with 200,000 others) to see the fireworks, but “I grow old … I grow old …” and in future it’s probably best left to youthful folks younger than I whilst I’m at home with my cocoa.  The other delight was revisiting one of the world’s most irreplacable and vital pieces of land: The British Library.  The BL is a beautiful modern building.  It becomes even more so if you read the architect Colin St John’s account of it: see The British Library (London: Scala Publishers, 2007).  At the beginning of this account St John says that “the library and what it houses embody and protect the freedom and diversity of the human spirit in a way that borders on the sacred” (p. 2).  The BL is a building absolutely designed to embody and encourage the love of scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge, and to celebrate the book above all else.  I think for me it is one of the most irreducably necessary places on earth.  There’s still time to catch the current exhibition on there: Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs (until March 7th 2010).

Last Wednesday, on December 16th, I attended an afternoon event at the University of Wolverhampton on ‘The VLE is Undead’.  This was a replay/development of a session first aired at the ALT-C conference in September 2009, entitled ‘The VLE is Dead’.  The event took the form of a debate, with James Clay and Nick Sharratt arguing for the continuing usefulness of VLEs, and Steve Wheeler and Graham Attwell suggesting that they are outmoded.  It was a ‘buzzy’ event, with advance interest generated by a “quick and dirty” social networking site: VLEUNDEAD and ‘live tweets’ being posted up via the data projector screen in the room where we were meeting as the event happened.   Most of the attendees were learning technologists within HE or FE; I was one of the few academics.  But I am genuinely interested in the future of such online learning spaces, seeing as I’ve invested quite a lot of my own time in making VLE platforms work within English Studies.  There’s a Cloudworks webpage on the ALT-C version of this event if you are interested.

There was discussion of the proprietorial ‘walled garden’ nature of VLES, commercial vs. open source vs. in-house VLEs, the perceived clunkiness of VLEs compared to Web 2.0 social software such as Facebook, the future of education and technology, the ever-increasing diversity of learning and learners into the 21st century, and much more.  One attendee made the very valid point that it is not so much that VLEs are outmoded as that many lecturers have never used them to their full potential, and dismiss them based on that lack of effective usage.  Personally I think that once you as a tutor see your own students/class using a VLE effectively — and obviously doing some rich learning using it — your views change.  As I say on the ‘About Ms E-Mentor’ page of this blog, my own classes that use online discussion activities would be lesser things without the online component, and that all happens within a VLE.

Maybe it is the case that a majority of academics won’t wish to do the necessary learning to manoeuvre round their institutions’ VLE, and that online pedagogic innovation will always be led by the few.  What I have found effective from my own experience is going into other departments as a subject specialist  and demoing effective use of VLEs. There’s still a great deal of interest in this from my colleagues across the UK in English Studies, many of whom still don’t really know how to make VLEs effective in their own teaching.  The VLE is a space, like a classroom is a space.  It’s what you do in it that matters and that makes learning happen.

So for me the VLE is very much not dead, or even undead.  I am sure VLE technologies and platforms will continue to develop — and so they should — but I’m very far from convinced that anything like learning is going on in the overwhelming majority of Facebook posts.  As the name suggests, it’s a ’social networking site’ and not a learning space.  My students’ discussion forum posts on the online activities I’ve been describing in this blog are very clearly about learning, and I still very much think there is a place for an enclosed online space connected to any given course, which is what VLEs offer.

My Victorian Vision class have just finished undertaking their final online session of the term and course.  Our final class was on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) in particular, and Sensation Fiction in general.  But the final online session of the term exploits the Victorians’ innovations in relation to the season of Christmas.

Illustrated London News cover, December 1845.

 Once again the class enter the Forum ‘in character’ as they did in ‘The Dickens Debate’ (see The Dickens Debate post on November 23rd)…but this time they can be any character from any work, or author of any work we have studied.  This means we’ve had Robert Audley, George Talboys, older and younger Cathys from Wuthering Heights, Esther, John Thornton, Margaret Thornton, Eulalie from Webster’s ‘A Castaway’ and the Lady of Shalott, amongst others, all telling each other what they are getting up to over Christmas.  To help them do this the class are given links to websites detailing Victorian traditions and customs (such as the first Christmas cards, and decorating Christmas trees).

Once again this exercise works on good character understanding and role play skills.  Wit, imagination and flair are positively encouraged, and some posts have been full of humour.  I also say that students may enter the forum in the guise of an author whom we have studied.  Usually no one much takes notice of this but this year we’ve had Dickens, Lizzie Siddall, Emily Bronte…AND William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti posting entirely in poetry!  ‘Being’ an author is more difficult to pull off than being a character I think, as to be convincing there obviously needs to be some knowledge of the author’s life in play, but it’s all part of the general unpredictability of any given cohort in a discussion forum.  It’s always the case that with each new year a different cohort comes up with something new in my online activities that no previous class has ever quite done.

And so The Victorian Vision Online comes to an end for 2009.  I’ll be marking what they’ve posted in due course, but time for some turkey and plum pudding first!

…and slouching slowly towards Christmas.  Actually I’ve had a really enjoyable term and although I don’t really feel I can stop yet (MA essay to write, book to edit…) there’s always both relief and a slight sadness when a course ends.  Today a couple of Erasmus students from Germany called by my office to say goodbye as they return home soon.  They’ve been a richly valuable addition to my Women’s Writing course.  And tonight was the final teaching session on The Victorian Vision, and hence the very final final class for one of the students who finishes her degree mid-year.  She said before everyone else came in that she felt “quite emotional” and said at the end that she had very much enjoyed my classes.  I’m looking forward to reading her dissertation on late Victorian poet Amy Levy in the new year.

There’s been a reasonably strong sense of community in my Victorian Vision class.  This is partly because it is Year 3 and friendships are well formed but  I hope the Victorian Vision Online has added to this.  This cohort has undoubtedly been the best ever in terms of their use of the general forum space that they named The What the Dickens?!  There have been regular postings on this throughout the past twelve weeks on everything from Jim Carrey’s new A Christmas Carol movie to geeky (but no doubt very trendy) online cartoons about the Victorians, to lots of links to dreadful/fantastic (delete as appropriate) Victorian kitsch.  I’m pleased it’s developed a life of its own.

We’ve also had a caption competition.  Here’s the image to which the students are invited to add a caption:

The class were given a week to come up with captions and there were 14 entries.  Previously I’ve chosen the winner, but I realise that they should be the ones to make the vote, so this year I used The What the Dickens?! to distribute all the captions once they were in and they voted by emailing me their choice.  The winner and runner up were both actually by the same person, so an outright winner there:

“Ever the stoic Victorian gentleman, Roger refuses to acknowledge that his feet are on fire”.

“The Suffragist letter-bomb campaign gets off to a bad start when Maud realises she’s forgotten the gunpowder”.

Third place would go to:  She: “Father!  The publisher — they’ve accepted my novel Wuthering Heights!  But I’m so terribly worried they’ll find out I’m a woman.  What should I do?”  He: “Oh, I think it’ll be fine … There’s no way a woman could produce work of such quality!”

Great stuff!

It’s Saturday — not a day I’m usually leaping out of my bed to my computer — but today I was up relatively early putting the finishing touches to my powerpoint for Monday’s final session on my Year 2 undergraduate course Women’s Writing.  We finish up with a brief discussion of  some of the issues related to Third Wave Feminism and I’ve been dipping into Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, eds. Gillis, Howie and Mumford (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; 2nd ed.).  This is an excellent collection of essays, all of which have extensive bibliographies to other key recent texts on the ‘third wave’.  I’ve also delved into Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young’s collection on Chick Lit (Routledge, 2006).  Having developed an interest in adaptation — primarily because I’m interested in the adaptations of Sarah Waters’ trilogy of neo-Victorian novels – the Austenmania of the 1990s onwards is a kind of side angle of this for me.  I have a sense that I am going to be teaching Austen alongside her late twentieth century transformations in the future.

But back to The Victorian Vision … and this week’s session was on the ubiquitous figure of the fallen woman.

For those of you who haven’t seen the Victorian Vision Online here’s a current screenshot from this week.  If you compare this with the screenshot inserted in my very first post on this blog, back in late September, you’ll see that the ‘Menu’ on the left has grown as a folder has been added each time a VVO session takes place.  The folders contain all the necessary instructions for that week’s session, and a link to the discussion forum itself.  It should be just possible to make out that the Session F folder is open, showing the guidelines and the link to the ‘Fallen Women’s Penitentiary’ where the students post their responses to the week’s activity.

Every year I find more Victorian images of fallen women.  I show a number in class, and in particular we do an exercise in reading Victorian narrative paintings via Augustus Egg’s Past and Present trilogy (1858). I have added three images — a study for Found by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1858), Ford Madox Brown’s Take Your Son, Sir! (1857), and George Watts’ Found Drowned (1867) — to my ‘homepage’ of our Victorians space on the VLE.  I add different images each week in tandem with the week’s theme or topic.   This keeps the homepage ‘fresh’ and dynamic as the term goes on.

The main texts the class consider are Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Jenny’ and Augusta Webster’s ‘A Castaway’ which work fabulously alongside each other.  We start the discussion of each in the classroom, reading the openings of both together so the context of each of these monologues is established, but then much more detailed discussion is taken online.  Thus far, after two days, those who have posted have plenty to say.

In addition to my academic job at Wolverhampton I have also ‘gone back to big school’ myself this term as I’ve started a part-time MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Manchester Metropolitan University.  There are numerous reasons why I’ve started it:  I’ve known about the course for some years, and the calibre of poets who contribute to it (Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jean Sprackland) speaks for itself; I have found previously that the structure of attending a course is productive for me in terms of my own poetry writing; I grew up on the south Manchester/Cheshire borders, so there is a conscious revisiting of my home city and my connections with the wider area; and — not least — I was quite ill last academic year and was off work for an extended period.  What that gave me was some time to step back from my job and to consider whether there was a way of my doing this course that I had been circling around for some time. So when I returned to work in April of this year I negotiated a temporary cut in my contract and was fortunate enough to get a place on the course.

There is also an Online version of the Creative Writing MA programme at Manchester Met, but — perhaps ironically — I knew I didn’t want to follow the MA that way.  I wanted to be there in the classroom with my fellow students.  I am, however, hoping to ‘gatecrash’ the online poetry group at some point this year and will no doubt post on this blog about that experience.

So I trundle up to Manchester once a week for 24 hours and enjoy the extraordinary student drag that is the ‘universities’ part of Oxford Road.  It’s a very buzzy, very ’street’ kind of area and I like the energy of it.  Thus far the course has been a crash course for me in modernist and twentieth century poetry and poetics — we read two poets a week.  As someone who focussed on the Victorians for my original postgraduate studies I seem to have managed to bypass modernism pretty much entirely in terms of my studies so far, so I’m learning a lot, and also getting a good sense of how twentieth century poetry has developed.

The downside is that I have to write an essay.  Over Christmas.  I want to do this like a hole in the head.  I always knew that the more obviously academic side of the assessment was going to be  a challenge in the sense that it’s the ‘developing my writing’ aspect of the course that has ultimately led me to choose to do it.  I know, of course, that reading and writing are intimately related, and as yet I don’t really know how the reading I’ve been doing this term will rub off on my own writing in the long term (although we’ve been pastiching the poets we read each week, which I’ve really enjoyed).  But assessment is assessment, and I’ve got an essay to write.  And — worse — we have to come up with our own title.  Too much choice!  Oh the tyranny of  infinite possibilities!  I woke up in the middle of the night the other day thinking “Is there a genuine way I can link Thomas Hardy and Adrienne Rich — or am I pushing that too far?”  My sympathy with my own students — who probably have several essays to write over the Christmas vacation — is going up by the hour…

As indicated in my previous post, my students have been studying Bleak House.  The online session that follows our classroom discussion of the novel takes the form of a debate.  The motion that they either are for or against is “This house believes the law is an ASS”.  But the twist from previous sessions is that they respond to this motion in character, as a character from ‘Bleak House’.   A novel like this is, of course, an absolute gift for some role play.  With a ‘cast’ of more than 50 characters there is no shortage of choice for them.  My only ‘rule’ is that they are all to be a different character; hence if they go into the forum intending to be, say, Jo, but find he is already playing his part in the discussion, they must choose another.  This means that the class need to be aware of what’s going on in the forum before they start posting.

Attorney and Client by 'Phiz'

We had spent quite a bit of time in class — more than usual — discussing Dickens’s use of characterization in the novel.  I’d been doing some reading of Pam Morris’s excellent Open University Press book on Bleak House (1991) and this had got me thinking in ways I hadn’t previously about the narrative voice of Esther as that of an illegitimate child, who is very unsure of herself — at least in the earlier part of the novel — not least because of the narratives about her past that she has internalized.  I’ve been newly aware as well of how the presentation of some characters — Sir Leicester for example — changes as the novel develops.  The satiric approach to Sir L turns into something more sympathetic by the end of the novel, with the turning point perhaps being his refusal to cast Lady Dedlock off once her secret is out.  This focus on character seems to have paid off in the forum.  The session guidelines encourage the class to pay careful attention to their character’s mannerisms, ways of speaking, catchphrases, nervous tics, and there’s some great stuff going on in there.  Jo is always a favourite — a chance for someone to have fun with mis-spelling!  There’s currently a very flightly Miss Flite, a rouged-up Volumina Dedlock, and one student has got Skimpole off to a tee.

I’ve written about such online role play sessions in a case study for the UK English Subject Centre: ‘Text. Play. Space: Creative Online Activities in English Studies’.  I think such kinds of online activities can work incredibly well in a discussion forum space.   In my experience English Studies students love the opportunity to do something creative like this.  They often don’t expect to be invited to ‘play’ in this way and maybe we should do it more as university lecturers. The play is, of course, done with a very specific intent, and the students who really are able to ‘get under the skin’ of their character will perform the best.  It’s a shame that I can’t show you in this blog some of the stuff they are coming up with, although if you are an English lecturer reading this and want me to visit your department to ‘demo’ the activities I’m describing here than you can get to see what my students get up to (See the ‘About Ms E-Mentor page).

Last week we started a two week exploration of Bleak House.   As an undergraduate myself I had the slightly strange experience of only studying Dickens via The Mystery of Edwin Drood and as my own research went on to focus on Victorian poetry I never really got into Dickens.   Since I’ve been on the other side of the desk that has changed, and I now think he’s terrific.  Bleak House, of course, is long, and that can pose its own challenges.  I know of at least one English department where staff have said to me that they just couldn’t teach such a long novel to their students.  I’m not sure what the rationale for that is, and I doggedly refuse to lose the ‘long novel’ experience from both my Victorians course and a level two course I teach on Realism and the Novel, despite the fact that every year, when module evaluation forms come in, there are always a couple of comments exclaiming “Middlemarch is too long”.   The Victorian period is the great period of belief in narrative and its possibilities to describe, create and recreate the world and it thus seems necessary to expose students to that very Victorian way of saying things at length.  A few weeks earlier we considered Elizabeth Barratt Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856).  I’ve never previously taught this, although, again, it was the choice of my idiosyncratic undergraduate tutor when I did the Victorians.  “Longer than Paradise Lost“, he said, “but it doesn’t feel like it.”  One of my current students agreed when she said she romped through Aurora Leigh but was struggling to keep up with the intricacies and complexities of the plot in Bleak House and the sheer staying power needed to get through 800+ pages of it.  Another student told me she’d been reading Bleak House on and off since last summer and still hadn’t got to the end.

So are there things that can help?  Teaching such very long texts over more than one week perhaps does, and I had also set a reading week before it as well.  My class have a longish research essay to do as one part of the assessment on this course and depending on the choice of question and texts they choose to focus upon I’m aware that some could just decide to opt out of bothering with a text like Bleak House altogether.  This is where using a VLE can come in very useful.

As I have a series of online VLE activities throughout the entire course (there are 7 sessions in total over the term) there is inevitably one on Bleak House.  As my assessment criteria suggest as a basic participation requirement that the highest grades are likely to go to students who have taken part in all sessions (although it’s ultimately qualitative criteria that decide this) then students who want to do well on the VLE part of the course will take part in all of them.  It’s undoubtedly the case that there’s more engagement with a long novel like Bleak House now that the class know there is an online activity on it, regardless of whether they wish to explore it further for their essay, than there was before I was using the VLE.

And this online session is often one of the best, and different in kind from any of the others thus described in this blog.  I’ll be posting again in a day or two once ‘The Dickens Debate’ is underway to describe what they’re getting up to…