"What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?"

All this talk of photo essays in class, and I had never heard of them before. I am so glad that we got an example of them in class on Monday. After looking at them, I think this is a great assignment for FYC students. We discussed how photo essays slow students down enough to maximize their on-task thought. In addition, collaboration on this type of creative assignment really forces students to discuss their own artistic ideas, and they may not have been challenged in this way before. I especially appreciate this assignment because the technology is not difficult to work with. Like Selfe puts forth: it is vital to create an assignment that maximizes dialectical engagement without cutting off students who don’t have a high technological literacy. So often we are discussing potential ways to incorporate technology into the classroom, and I find myself thinking that if I were a student, the technology itself would be a barrier for me. Maybe I’m just an old grandma when it comes to new technology—I have a basic grasp of how to do most things, but I often find myself thinking that the payoffs of learning some new technology don’t seem to be worth the struggle of learning it. I also am more than willing to recognize that upcoming students will have a better literacy of technology than I do.

As a student, I have always had a reluctance and an apprehensiveness toward both group projects and projects that required more than a basic knowledge of technology. Group projects seemed to exist just so I could carry the weight of four or five other students in my class, and they always somehow ended up with me (or if I was lucky, me and one other person) scrambling the night before it was due to finish every other neglected portion of the project. I think one of the worst cases of this was during my junior year of undergrad, when my professors wanted the entire Cultural Theory class (about 25 students) to collaborate on a group project to create a mock-news program. Everything worked out okay (mostly because we were a classroom full of honors students), but the stresses of collaborating with such a large group and trying our darndest to cope with difficult and unfamiliar technology in the span of two or three weeks almost proved to be too much. We ended up dividing the program into sketches, much like SNL sketches, and writing and filming in our smaller groups, and editing it together subsequently. (I’m embarrassed to say that a friend and I wrote a rap of new social media diction that has been added to our vocabulary over the years… and it turned out a’ight.)

…All this to say that I never dreamed of assigning many (if any) group projects after becoming a professor. Dr. Rice’s statement in class that all assignments should be group projects was some serious food for thought for me. I understand that in the “real world,” collaboration is an essential skill, and I agree that it should be practiced at least once a semester. However, I do not think that making every project a group project in college would be great practice of the type of collaboration students will have to do in the “real world,”—if only due to the fact that at a job, the students get paid, whereas in school, the students are paying. For students who are used to getting by with the bare minimum grades, there is no reason for them to try in a group; rather, groups tend to protect lazy students and punish good students simultaneously. While we can make the argument that this also happens in the “real world,” we also have to acknowledge that in one instance, you can get fired, whereas in the other, you might just get a lower grade.

I think that for group projects to work, they must be like these photo essays. You must be able to see the collaboration, having each student define and defend the role s/he takes up during the project. In continuation with this idea, I think that groups should never receive one collective grade.