Have a good weekend!

Have a great weekend! I will be grading the posts over the next few days. Please do get started on your resume and cover letter. The deadline is coming up shortly!

CPR Extension and Tone and Audience Assignment

Due to some of the questions regarding CPR, I am extending the deadline until Friday at midnight. If for some reason you didn't complete the assignment, you have the chance to try again.

This first CPR assignment is an all or nothing grade--if you complete the entire process, you receive credit for participation. The assignment is designed to help you understand the process that we will use for each major assignment in the class. So, once you learn the pattern, it will make sense. So, while you are given grades by CPR for the assignment, they are just for your reference for this first assignment. I won't use them to grade you this first time around. Think of this as the warm up to the rest of CPR.

Tone, Audience and Blogs Assignment

I am pleased to see that this early in the semester we are starting to have some questions regarding what is the point of blogging in technical writing. SO, I would like you to read through this entire blog post and respond to some of the issues and points that I raise in a blog post on your blog. This is due by midnight, Tuesday, February 15, as noted on the WebCT calendar.

Take a look at the discussion on Nate's blog. Be sure to read the comments as well (and maybe add one of your own?).

Nathan raises some interesting points. Let me respond to some of them here. You can pick up the conversation on your blog, ok?

Web Delivered Course:
Not every student thrives in a web delivered course. This is about "knowing" yourself. What kind of learner are you? Some students find that they need face to face interaction with their instructor and someone to remind them to complete tasks. These students don't do well in web delivered courses. Ultimately this is just about how you learn--we all learn differently. Other students find that the flexibility of web delivered courses and the fact that they learn best from reading make the web delivered course right. You need to think about how you learn and what the class does and doesn't do.

Multiple Web Pages:
Some of you have concerns about the multiple places that our class is housed. I can tell you that this class simulates the types of tasks that you will be asked to complete on the job. In other words, you will not find a professional job that doesn't ask you to gather data from multiple sources, synthesis and produce an outcome. So, yes, you will need to have multiple screens open to complete tasks. This is similar to working from multiple documents, an email your boss sends, the rules of the organization, a directive that your boss gives you in the hall, and your personal goals to complete a task at work.

Blogging:
What's the point, asks Brandy--Actually she asks "what does Blog have to do with a tech class"? As I mentioned in one of the first posts to my blog, I think blogs can do a couple of things very well.

1. This is a writing course--I notice that Brandy forgot the "writing" part in her post. Perhaps that is why she doesn't see the point in blogging? The only way that you will learn to do something well is to practice. Your blog lets you practice writing and writing often.

2. The blog is an excellent way to get you to think about tone and audience. So, take Nate's entry and the responding comments. Here's what you need to think about. Your instructor reads all the blogs and comments. I'm your boss. What tone should you use? Who is your audience? How public is your entry?

If there is one thing that I want you to learn from this class, it is to control your tone in your writing. All too often people send the angry, first response email. This is the email that immediately responds to a problem or situation. This is a really bad idea for a number of reasons. Ultimately, you send an email, write a letter, write a post, etc. because you want to get something changed or done. If you make the audience angry or annoyed, what is the chance that you will be able to get the audience to do something to change the situation? Probably very little. So, don't use your writing to vent publicly. Instead, you want to wait a bit (until you cool down--I call it the 24 hour rule) and then carefully read through your written response. You want to appear rational and thoughtful, not angry and irrational. You want to convince your reader to do something--what is the best way to approach the audience?

Frustration:
It is not unreasonable to be a bit frustrated. There is a learning curve to the course (as you might see with all courses where you have to work at the material). Once you master the various technology pieces, however, you will see that each piece of the course follows the same pattern. So, the learning curve will level off. I would argue that the technical part of the course title (Technical Writing) is being served by the various technology pieces that you use.

CPR Question/Next Assignment

CPR Question

Angie writes:

"Hi, I have read through the syllabus and CPR information and still am a little confused.
I understand that each CPR is worth 5%. I was wondering, if our ratings don't match
yours, are we penalized? Or, do we just get a completion grade for doing the CPR for
each assignment?"

Angie asks some super questions about how CPR is used in the class. Let me try to give you additional information.

You receive a grade for each of your assignments and a grade for each CPR.

CPR allows you to review how I judge technical writing documents using a very specific set of criteria. This is the calibration stage. I have included 3 assignments in each calibration. One is great, one ok, one is not very good (High, Medium, Low). You will see these same assignments and grade them following the question set, trying to match my criteria. This section tries to teach you what makes good technical writing.

Then you will receive 3 of your classmate's papers to do the same scoring, with the same questions.

Finally, you get your own paper again to score.

The grading is actually pretty complex--you don't receive a completion score for the A1-A4 assignments--just the initial assignment.

A1-A4 are weighted in this manner:

Text Entry: 30%
Calibrations: 10%
Reviews: 30%
Self-Assesssment: 30%

What does that mean? Let me break down each piece:

Text Entry: This score is the score that you are given for your actual assignment. It is initially based on the peer review scores (weighed by how well your peer calibrate--the closer to my calibration results, the more the peer score counts). Then, I check the score to make sure it is accurate, making changes if necessary. This will also be the grade you receive on your paper.

Calibrations: This score is what you are given for matching the calibrations on the first three papers. There is some room for mistakes--you can miss a few and still score a perfect score. You are also allowed to retake them once if you have problems. The calibrations are designed to help you understand what is important to look for in the papers.

Reviews: These are the reviews that you complete for your peers. Your review score is based on how well you calibrate to each other and based on your calibration scores as well.

Self-Assesment: This score is what you are given for calibrating to your peer review scores of your paper. So, if you give yourself an A and your peers gave you a C, you won't receive many points in this section. The goal is accuracy.

All of this complex mathematical formula is to give you accurate and fair scores. Please be aware that I will look at each step of the process to be sure that things are accurate. If not, I will adjust grades.

When we finish our first CPR do look carefully at the results. This will all make much more sense. There is a lot of information to be learned about how people review your papers. Please make use of it--it will make your writing better!

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 is now available on WebCT, under the Course Materials. Please read the assignment carefully and get started. Don't wait until the last minute!

AND! Check out Chris' Lab Pictures and Renee's cool camping pictures.

CPR Woes

I believe that a number of you are having a few problems with CPR and the assignment. I've tried to correct the problem today, so hopefully things will go a bit more smoothly. This is why we do a small trial run of CPR--so the major assignments go off a bit better. As you work through CPR let me know if you find any links that don't work or if your paper isn't your paper in the self assessment section.

If you have any questions about your assignment at all this is the time to ask. Some of you were having some questions about your paper code--it is the same as member ID/Site number.

So, keep going with the CPR. We have added all of the technology pieces to our class, so things will get easier in the next few weeks.

Tomorrow I will post your first major assignment.