<< Review, Reflections, & Revision in Progress will be completed August 22, 2010 >>
Action Plan Motto “Get’r Done Now!”"ENGL 1301 & 1302 as presented online at TTU requires in depth skills prior to taking the course. Third party labs should be purchased well in advanced prior to taking this course to ensure you will be prepared. I can see where the Bedford online tools would help. I also believe some of the Pearson Mastering course could prepare you. By then you could clep out or take an AP test. Unless you are prepared in advance, taking this course expecting to learn from lectures or lectures notes is a false expectation promoted by the CODE and the ENGL Catalogue entries.”As with any project, selecting a contractor to provide services requires careful specification. The terms and conditions of any contract can come into ambiguity because the less than stellar precision if the English Language.
Where Textbook does not mean textbook and where other aspects of the pedagogy has been evolved, hybridized, or otherwise altered for profits[this may not be a bad thing when accomplished for good of the student community]. I am still teaching myself with little or no real added value from this course and the provision provided online or offline by the TTU English Department. I have yet to complete the portion of the course and am working to complete an incomplete. Reflections on perfections? Once you do without any feedback or mentoring one will be little better than a monkey at a typewriter.Not only the writing theory is lacking dissertation within the scope and text of the anthology we find as in “First Year Writing: Writing in the Disciplines”; there is little if any available feedback systematized in the framework of the Raider Writer.
As a Learning Management System, Raider Writer fails miserably on many levels. From a system engineering outlook this is at the best an alpha code that has yet to be tested for metrics of design standards. Real lack if system specification adds noise to the relationship of the student-learning aka audience & consumer with the contributor that would be the English Departments Teacher of Record and the Document reviewers.I believe I have learned this is more complex in its construction than intended. My goal at this juncture is to complete the course and to student the comparative day to day changes of the distance blog from the first days of the class in June to the present and to compare it to the other content online from previous version of prior or current instructors.
Clearly, this distance blog is not instructional other than providing additional assignment material and some dialogue of motivation. For any real instructional one must pay Pearson or others to learn the aspects presented in the textbook and then take this course as a “final exam” for credit.The current state of the art in this area of student writers has clearly eclipsed the TTU English Department’s understanding and they perfect this current curriculum for online distance learning with lectures being replaced with content of the Pearson Custom Textbook and any other product offered by Pearson Learning Systems. Other than the test features of the Bedford products online the real value is in the St. Martin’s Handbook 6/e in hardback. In the art and the science of writing or authoring works it is more about the relationships of your own peer group you can recruit and call upon for critique and review of the works and how they may or may not be accomplished by your current draft.The social metrics of WP and Raider Writer as presented in this course do not provide for this team approach to writing.
In the real world, I can offer from my own experiences this can be accomplished both online and directly in Face to Face networking. Black Board and other e-Learning Management Systems provide for this team-social connectivity lacking in the English Department @ TTU first year writing online courses. I am sure in time with additional money, code, and talent that this system may evolve. The real question is the quest worth the delay when off the shelf tools exceed the means of the current destination of the Raider Writer System Design Protocols?I am not a better writer today because of this program. I have however benefitted greatly from Library 1100 online course and can whole heartedly recommend it to all. Without that course, I doubt I would have been in a position to struggle to the bitter ends in this course.
This is not about personalities. This is solely a matter of definition of design and TC of the original catalogue specification for the course. I believe in the future some or all of these issues raised will have to be address by University College “CODE” and how this course is promoted “sold” to the consumer. I did not take the initial course ENGL 1301 so my comments are limited to the review of this Summer Semester 2010 and the prior online blogs of previous classes for ENGL 1302 both online or in class. Few if any citations exist in the online distance blog are made to the previous website with prior content. I do not suggest error or failure to cite but would strongly suggest all take note this is malformed in its totality and should be reviewed, revised, republished, and retained in a fixed format with annual review to be in sync with the next Textbook Editions from Pearson or others who may contract such custom editions textbooks or other handbooks.
Once I am completed in the full aspects of the assignments found in the Raider Writer table labeled Syllabus, I will have to revisit this post to add a final reflection. The course syllabus is segmented and embedded across the modules on the distance blog, the Pearson First Year Writing: Writing Across the Disciplines, Raider Writer Code, and the course standards maintained by the English Department. Part of the course challenges is to piece it all together into you own action list. Any enabling skills you may not have or cannot acquire from the textbook will have to seek other sources of help. Writing Center may provide some help but again if you do not have the skills to begin with at the first of this course, be prepared to get addition labs or “mastering” training elsewhere. Library.ttu.edu is a great tool to find online audios, videos, etc. for “Rhetoric & Composition” … even You-tube(TM) is a great place to look.
