Teaching in the Cloud

The Challenge

Spring of 2015 brought record-breaking snows to Salem State University. The cursed white stuff managed to fall on a schedule that made Monday classes a fading memory. My Special Topics in Professional Writing class met only once per week, on Mondays, naturally. I could plan for the Monday of MLK Day and the Monday of President’s Day, but with Patriots Day looming on the horizon, it seemed like the Snow Gods wanted my syllabus to die of frostbite. By early February, my students were forgetting what I looked like. Lord knows, I could not identify them. The class and I were cursed.

I resolved to fight back. If I could not change the weather, I could change the delivery of the course. Yet I could not hope for relief from plows, shovels, dogsleds, or mukluks. The terrain around SSU was hospitable only to the Inuit.

Complicating the challenge was that the special topic was Vampires, Werewolves, Wizards and Zombies, a flashy course title for Genre Writing, a title conceived as a lure for a generation of students weaned on Harry Potter. As with any good writing class, interaction and discussion of readings and student writing was required. Effective writing is not accomplished by “top-down” instruction. Yet generating conversation, real or electronic, among 20 students scattered across the North Shore, most with spotty internet connections, posed an additional challenge. If you’ve ever been involved in an email chain with 20 people, each of whom respond with Reply All, you know how a single emailed idea can in short order mushroom into hundreds of responses, a situation that can give an illusion of widespread participation when in reality people stop reading at all. Who can march through all that email? Worse would be to act as each and every student’s private editor, reducing the class to 20 directed studies, a solution that would lead me to throw myself under the wheel of a bus, if I could find one behind the next snowdrift.

One goal of the class was to appreciate that reading in the grand Western tradition pays intellectual and creative dividends to every professional writer. J.K. Rowling populated the dark woods surrounding Hogwarts with creatures familiar to Homer. Marion Zimmer Bradley in The Mists of Avalon reworks the Arthurian Legends from a feminist perspective, but that could be read only after grounding our studies in the grand tradition by viewing John Boorman’s Excalibur, a film starring Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson, with a score by Richard Wagner. Homework included looking at Monty Python and the Holy Grail to see what understanding we could come to for tone. Any number of contemporary films scripted by professionals adopt new perspectives to reinvent fairytales and legends: homework included  Freeway, Oliver Stone’s take on Little Red Riding Hood, and American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis with its justifiably famous pre-CGI transformation. Those experiences would require discussion to reach an inescapable conclusion: Genre authorship is not about re-stirring clichés. If Shakespeare could steal from the best, who were we not to steal ghosts, spirits, and witches from Shakespeare? Quiet domestic, suburban angst may be the stuff of New Yorker fiction, but it is not the mainstream. If it were, what could we make of Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, Franz Kafka, John Irving, Jorge Luis Borges, Gunter Grass, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Becket, and a host of other late 20th century writers? Are they just a bunch of hacks?

The Context

The blizzards began as group reports on Fabulous Beasts were coming due. That meant peer-to-peer instruction and rich discussion, but we had no classroom.

What to do?

First, I could assume that as an advanced Professional Writing course, the students had completed an introductory class in which writing was defined as a social activity, a fact that many students and academics initially find anti-intuitive. Literary art may be produced in garrets and dusty book-lined studies, but the belief that composition and research are ordinarily achieved in splendid isolation defies observable reality. Submitting work to a certified authority figure named teacher, or professor, or editor, or dissertation adviser so the authority figure may correct spelling, places punctuation, and unscrambles weak syntax is a synthetic process designed to teach rudimentary writing, but any professional environment that encouraged deliberate multiple iterations of the identical content was on The Bankruptcy Express.

Second, I could assume my students had an inkling of professional collaborative processes. Professional collaboration presumes individuals skilled at different functions serially or, when possible, simultaneously performed. If you’ve sat through a soul-sucking meeting where colleagues discuss wording and punctuation, you already know why professional writers do not confuse coming to a consensus with collaborate. Writers write, researchers research, editors edit, proofreaders proofread, fact-checkers check facts. The delusion that everyone at a professional table has equal expertise and warrants airtime is why task-oriented academic groups go forward at glacial speeds. My professional writing students had already learned that efficiency is achieved in an organization that adheres to a philosophy of touch once and pass. Know your function, perform it swiftly and accurately, deliver, and allow the team to move forward to a new project.

Finally, I could assume my students were digitally literate. Rudimentary online collaboration is a tenet of SSU’s introduction to professional writing. Paper and ink are lovely, but professionalism in content creation and process today almost exclusively occurs in cyberspace.

We do not teach young people to function as writers in the same way writers functioned in 1825. We have moved beyond Gutenberg. Professional Writing in English at SSU teaches the skills and processes of the 21st century. Colleagues who want to excuse their own technological clumsiness may want to believe that youth are somehow adept with all things digital from birth, but they should be cautioned that just as knowing how to turn on a TV does confer the knowledge of how to produce TV news, knowing how to send a cell phone text message does not confer the skills of online collaboration. In English, we teach content creation for leadership, not as a pleasant hobby, and writing is more than stringing words into sentences like so many colored bits of popcorn threaded onto yarn at Christmas.

What to Do

To defeat the Snow Gods, I needed online collaborative tools that were accessible, intuitive, and required minimal bandwidth. Not everyone was snowbound with robust internet connections.

I dislike Canvas, and the class was never designed to use it. Canvas is a powerful tool, but that is part of the problem. In my seven years as a business/IT journalist at the dawn of the Digital Age, it was a postulate that ease of use meant understood at a glance, not only after hours of training sessions. Canvas feels to me like one is deploying a Panzer tank to hunt a mosquito. It can be done, but why bother? 

I turned instead to The Cloud.

The cloud would allow my students to use any device they had handy, from smart phones to work stations, and was independent of platform. Apple? Windows? Android?  Sure, why not?

Some readers will be surprised to learn that cloud computing for collaboration and document management is at least 20 years old. This is hardly bleeding edge stuff. Bandwidth and computer speeds have improved to the point that streaming video and music hardly hiccup. Back in the day, one organization for which I was an editor paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to install the necessary systems to create an in-house online collaboration writing tool and document repository. I later served as editor-in-chief of a commercial magazine that had no physical address beyond a postal box, a fact that saved us quite a bit on rent, but in no way prevented the staff from constant online interactivity. My eight staffers and many more freelancers all worked from home.

The difference today is that those mechanisms are free.

My suite of tools would therefore be:

• SSU Polaris email
• my SSU website
• a blog
• Google Docs in asynchronous and synchronous modes.

Polaris Email

Email gets the ball rolling. If you have neglected this crucial function of SSU’s Polaris, but have found yourself deciphering crabbed handwritings as you dutifully type each and every address on a handwritten list, you need to rethink your relationship with Polaris beyond being the place where you enter grades. True, email attachments out of the Polaris interface are not at this time possible, but SSU has no better or more efficient mechanism to initiate communications between faculty and students. Check off the box that reads Notify, and send an email with further instructions, including links.

A Website

My SSU website is still handy for me, though I admit that like me, it is becoming an anachronism. SSU’s IT department will give you the server space if you ask, but no teacher any longer needs to learn HTML coding to post announcements, documents, graphics, and links to multi-media sources.  I populate my site with content before the semester begins, and from time to time add to it. Feel free to poke around.

If you are used to spending happy hours running a photocopying machine while whole forests are leveled so you may distribute paper assignments that violate intellectual property laws, you need to consider saving the planet and the university’s budget. Publish your class materials online.

The equivalent functionality to my website can be achieved by any blog service, but there are now several online website creation tools that are drag-and-drop WSIWYG –What You See Is What You Get. 

Interested readers should explore WIX and WEEBLY. Both include server space, robust tools, and are free. WordPress, known for blogs, now also offers free websites.

Muck around. These online tools do not gather millions of users because they are difficult and obscure. If an eleven-year-old can master website construction to augment the sale of Girl Scout cookies, the required skills are probably within a college professor’s grasp.

You have to want to, is all. Abandon the self-fulfilling prophesy that you and technology do not get along. If you believe that a university education prepares an individual for a lifetime of education, drink your own Kool-Aid.?

A Blog

Blogs and social media have become the online tools of choice for good reason: they are free, and quick to learn. WordPress, an open software platform, has become the industry standard, though there are many more blog hosting sites to choose from. At WordPress, you can choose from hundreds of free templates and be publishing graphics and text in minutes.

I converted an existing WordPress blog for my class’s use, which accounts for the unfortunate title, The Cassandrist. I deleted materials I’d written in 2009, imposed a new theme (design) that allowed multiple entries to be visible at once, and was in business.

Note how entries on my blog link to other tools in the suite. For example, click on the Fabulous Beast reports, and note that they link to reports the students had sent me that I then uploaded to my SSU website. Check out the Snow Lectures—there were 4, and they included links and homework. Notice how Snow Lecture #3 refers to readings in a Course Pack, a collection of non-proprietary readings available for download on my SSU website.

If this seems like a lot of work, bear in mind that not only was I as snowbound as everyone else, but the alternative was no instruction at all.?

Google Docs – Asynchronous and Synchronous

Since I wanted feedback and class discussion, I employed Google Docs, an online tool every academic needs to understand. The sharp-eyed reader may have noticed the blog’s page, The Post Google Scramble.

Please, no moaning about security. Ominous warnings about privacy are particularly amusing coming from people who have no qualms about handing a credit card over to an anonymous food server who vanishes into the shadows with it and returns with a bill. Use Google. There are no criminals eager to read you and your students’ musings.

To understand the theory of how Google Docs works, it might be best to allow Google to explain. Note that Google’s 2:26 explanation is a YouTube video. You can find out how to change your oil, fix your plumbing, or bake cinnamon donuts on YouTube—such are the joys or crowdsourcing.

Google Docs in Plain English (video)

You’ll need a Google account to access Google Docs—though your students will not. Sign up at google.com.

Google Docs is a central document repository. It is free and will store almost all your documents. Your family photos can get unwieldy, so you’ll need another online storage location for those.  Among other things, a central repository means that when you drop your laptop into Salem harbor, your life’s work is perfectly safe—provided you uploaded it.

Less well known is that in addition to storage, Google Docs works as an editing mechanism. Once uploaded, you can create different privacy settings and editorial privileges for each document—who can see it, who can comment, who can change it.

Finally, a document uploaded to Google can be accessed by different writers/editors at different times or — and this is astonishing—simultaneously. Those two modes of access are called respectively Asynchronous and Synchronous. Either form of collaboration may be conducted with participants at opposite ends of the earth, and frequently are.

This document, Google Scramble #2, was created by 20 students and a professor, all of whom were online at the same time—the hour preordained when the class was supposed to have met but classes at SSU had been canceled. Notice of the meeting and a link to the Google Doc had been sent from Polaris. That’s how simple it is to arrange asynchronous editing mode.

It was amazing to see type creeping across the screen as people many miles apart were online simultaneously. The general topic of that Google scramble was how to interpret folklore, specifically issues surrounding gender. The readings, of course, were in the online Course Pack.

Note, too, no one needed a Google account to participate. They only needed a link to the document and editing privileges.

I’ve reset the editing privileges so readers of this article may look but not touch. If you have no grasp of how setting privileges is achieved, you may find this video helpful.

Looking at Google Scramble #2, note that by convention my students were asked to put their names on their input and choose an editorial color.

Students electronically arrived and saw

Instructions for the Google Scramble

Feel free to write as much (or as little) as you wish under each topic. There are FOUR  topics on what will start as 6 pages.  

Respond to them in any order you please. I’ll hold back a bit while students work.  Then we will discuss in Chat mode at the lower right.

You can’t tell from the document as it now appears, but during our synchronous session, a Chat mode box at the lower right allowed participants to talk to each other without affecting the document. It was activated by the Comments button in the upper right—now inactive and grayed.

In session, the six pages I’d prepared with lots of blank space quickly grew to 11 full pages. We limited the session to 2 hours—attention spans wane. It was wonderfully creative chaos about Beauty and the Beast and The Tinder Box, with references to Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment.

Note, finally, as a matter of Best Practices, I set up the Scramble questions in advance of the ordained time. Students began writing answers as soon as they arrived. The document was left online for study purposes—in other words, the class had not only created conversation but notes from which to study.

This was so much fun that after the thaw several students asked if we could not continue in this mode.  I was tempted.

Summary

Kick off with an email blast generated from Polaris that offers minimal instructions and a link to one or two of the employed cloud technologies.

Key to effective use of cloud technologies is their interconnected links to each other. My SSU website links to various sources as well as the WordPress blog, and that the WordPress blog links back to the website, and that these URLs were included in emails.

If you are not in an emergency situation caused by weather or illness, demonstrations in class, especially of Google Docs, will certainly pay off.

Preparing a Google Doc before a scramble is a distinct advantage, bringing some order to what otherwise seems like chaos.

Questions?

Send an email to pglasser@salemstate.edu.