Tips
on Teaching with BlackboardTips
on Teaching with Blackboard
We
offer the following suggestions as practical extensions of the theoretical framework
we have already laid out. They are not meant to be prescriptive, and their applicability
depends entirely on the expertise of the students and the limitations of the
educational environment. Some students may be able to manipulate Blackboard’s
features as they vary their own voice; others might have trouble simply accessing
the website. We have listed the tips roughly in order from the least to the
most complex.
1. Use the full spectrum of authority and playfulness.
If
the instructor is always evaluating, looking over, checking on every contribution
a student makes to Blackboard, this space is not going to seem like the student’s
own in any liberating way. For
teaching writing in particular, it is important to allow spaces for unevaluated,
or at least playful, writing within a Blackboard Classroom. When setting discussion forums, peer review, and file sharing
assignments, it is sometimes helpful to have a space that seems to be connected
to less high stakes, especially at the beginning of the term. It is also worth
devoting time early on in a lab setting to student exploration of the “Tools”
section. Get them to personalize
their accounts, adding nicknames if appropriate.
Have them look over the calendar and tasks functions, and make entries
there. Ask them to do private brainstorming
on the electronic blackboard.
2. Look for and encourage active engagement.
Allow yourself time as the instructor to look over the traffic on your page, using the statistics function but also various visual clues. Which spaces are getting the most use? Which spaces tend to generate the most engaged use of the technology (careful threading, for example)? Take the time to trace the narrative of your Blackboard course as it emerges during the semester.
Suggested exercise: For a discussion forum early in the term, require students to use the threading function creatively. Tell them that if they hit the reply button they must also alter the subject line, and insist that everyone insert a comment into the middle of an earlier area of the discussion. Because students sometimes tend to write responses as if they were to be read only by the instructor, it is worth asking them to begin their posts by addressing them directly to another student. A simple “Heather, I disagree with you…” or “John, I’m not sure what you mean…” will go a long way toward broadening the audience beyond the instructor. (This tip reflects material in "Dialogic Blackboard")
3. Integrate disparate classroom spaces.
Unless
we are teaching exclusively in a distance learning setting, we will of course
see our students in a conventional classroom as well as in a virtual space. Try to keep movement between the two types of spaces fluid
and easy to negotiate, perhaps with exercises that start in one place, spill
over to another, and then return to the space of origin. For instance, initiate
class discussion by quoting a snippet of dialogue from the virtual chat room,
or ask students to begin a discussion forum by referring to a comment that another
student made in class.
4. Recognize the dark spots and enable privacy.
A
student who works in Blackboard is not, thankfully, always on view. Though students
cannot enter the class site without their presence being registered, there is
no reason that they cannot use the site to post drafts, brainstorming, and essays
that the instructor will never see. Using the “Add file” button in the Dropbox
under the Tools section, they can add files to their own account without sending
them to the instructor. They can also use the “electronic blackboard” space
within this same section; this serves as a kind of private notepad that is protected
but always available.
5. Recognize dissymmetry.
Be
aware that the dissymmetry of Blackboard runs both directions, and that students
do not see what we see, nor know what we know. The easiest way to remind ourselves
about this dissymmetry is to create a ghost student—an imaginary individual
whose account you can access. Otherwise, it’s difficult for instructors to know
what our students’ space actually looks like.
6. Tell students what we know.
Consider
the value of telling your students early in the course about the information
that Blackboard provides to instructors, like the Statistics function.
A dark reason for doing this might be that, as Foucault argues, students
need to know they are being supervised before they can be expected to change
their behavior. More positively,
it sets a precedent for honesty and straightforwardness about the ways you plan
to evaluate them. It is even possible
to show students some of the statistics as a way of increasing their awareness
of their own work habits. For instance, they can see how often they have checked
certain parts of the site, or at what times they have logged onto the course.
7. Discuss the burden of ubiquity.
For some students, Blackboard can make a course into a burden, and that burden needs to be acknowledged. Naturally we want them to carry our courses with them, to take the ways of seeing with them as they read other cultural texts. The danger with Blackboard is that it will be the course apparatus—the syllabus, assignments, and grades—that will follow the students wherever they go, rather than the intellectual content of the course. Used well, a Discussion Forum can keep students usefully engaged in a course all semester long; used badly, it merely requires them to click a few comments without thinking.
Students
also need guidance in how to avoid becoming overwhelmed by technology. We have
sometimes noticed students—often those struggling with the course—who have logged
into the course an extraordinary number of times. What are they looking at?
The frequency of their visits can provide an opening point for a discussion
about their attitudes or anxieties about the course. We have to be careful here:
“I see that you have logged onto this course 12.8 times per week in the last
month” may produce paranoia rather than discussion, but handled judiciously,
it lets us work with students on how to manage technology. Rather than leaving
it mystified, we suggest letting students know that we ourselves have to find
the right balance between ignoring on-line discussion and becoming obsessed
by it. Consider telling them about discussion lists to which you belong so that
they can see how professionals struggle with the same kinds of issues that they
face.
8. Help students see their material world.
The writing spaces in Blackboard tend to ignore specifics of context, community, and the material realities from within which our students write, so that these details often seem to be mere “debris” in the writing process. In fact, as most of us know and as both Bakhtin and de Certeau point out, these elements are very much a part of any utterance.
Suggested exercise: Have students
write a “context profile” as a freewriting assignment.
Ask them to sit down in their rooms or in a lab for thirty minutes at
a time of day or night when they are most likely to be using Blackboard.
The assignment is to write about what they see on the screen in comparison
to what is going on in the room around them—colors, sounds, levels of noise,
amount of clutter (virtual or concrete).
9. Encourage audience analysis.
Blackboard
allows for several different internal communities and several different spaces
of discourse. For a writing class,
these differences offer a chance for analyzing the interplay between audience,
expectations, and language. After
a period of active Blackboard use, consider incorporating an exercise that asks
students to look back over the types of language that the class has used in
three different spheres of Blackboard (for instance, in the larger class discussion,
in a small group’s virtual chat, and in documents produced for evaluation by
the instructor).
10. Distinguish among levels of publicity.
Blackboard is sometimes heralded as a way of making student work public, and insofar as it encourages students to share their work with each other, it disrupts a pedagogy that limits readership to the instructor alone. At the same time, however, it takes some work to use Blackboard as a truly public space, for Blackboard does not facilitate student publishing on the web. It is important not to be duped into thinking that students are entering the public sphere when in fact they are members of a very limited private sphere—that of their classmates and perhaps other students at their institution.
The
limited publicity of Blackboard can, however, be both broadened and also turned
into an object of inquiry. Outside guests—writers, alumni who are involved in
subjects in the course, etc.—can be invited into a virtual chatroom or a discussion
forum. Students can be asked to publish their material on the web and to link
it into the Blackboard course, as Dickie Selfe (forthcoming) recommends. And
courses from different institutions can be coordinated, using Blackboard as
a common meeting space. In each case, students should be asked to consider how
their various degrees of publicity forced them to write differently. How, for
instance, assumptions about audience change when writing is directed not to
other students at a small, rural, liberal arts college and instead is directed
to web readers generally or to students with different geographical, economic,
and social backgrounds? These are not difficult situations to set up, but neither
are they made obvious within the architecture of Blackboard.
11. Enable open-endedness.
Too
often Blackboard assignments are perceived as finite and disposable, but if
we want our students to engage this space, we might think about ways to keep
areas of it alive for them. This
might mean assignments that encourage a return to an earlier set of entries,
or it could mean leaving some aspect of the page (for instance a discussion
forum on a hot topic, or external links that the class found useful) available
after the semester is over. If
that is not possible within a given institutional structure, the class could
also form a listserv for as long as interest continued or create a separate
web page elsewhere.
12. Teach students the art of virtual walking.
For the student user, when we encourage “walking,” we are encouraging an individual to construct his or her own narrative within the map of Blackboard. The student needs to be able to tell the story of an idea as it develops across defined spaces—from syllabus to discussion board to drafting to peer review.
Suggested
exercise: Late in the semester, after heavy Blackboard use, have students trace
one concept or term as it occurs in at least three separate spaces in this term’s
Blackboard course, and tell the story of that idea as they think it has unfolded.
13. Encourage irreducible collaboration.
Blackboard
tends to make undifferentiated collaboration difficult. Each thread gets a name,
as does each comment. How can students really work together on a document and
get collaborative credit? Virtual
chats in real time (as MUDs, Dedalus, and other programs have taught us) are
one way to accomplish group brainstorming, though in Blackboard each comment
is assigned to a single author in this space.
Suggested exercise: Set up a class discussion forum that allows anonymous postings. Have each group work within their group pages to create a jointly authored document (paper, paragraph, project proposal). Then have each group post to the discussion forum, signing their group name in the subject line. Voilà: joint authorship on Blackboard. (This tip reflects material in "Dialogic Blackboard" and also later in "Dialogic Blackboard")