Meet Your Prof and Get Orientated
About your Teacher
Professor McGuire
Hi and thanks for stopping by. My name is Mike McGuire, and I teach writing at Moraine Valley Community College. This learning.writing101.net site is where I run my online classes, so if you are enrolled in one, you are in the right place. Welcome. I’ve been teaching at Moraine for six years now and have been teaching online (and face-to-face) at Moraine and other places for nearly a decade. Teaching and learning online can be a great experience, as long as everyone remembers that it is not a lone activity, that it is not an independent study, and that it is not a self-paced endeavor–at least not in my classes. Read on to learn more.
A Course Philosophy
Ok, so if you’ve taken other online courses at Moraine, you should notice first of all that this class is different in that it is not housed within the BlackBoard course management system, which most online courses at the College use. I have made a deliberate decision to move away from BlackBoard to try some other technology for good reasons. With BlackBoard and other systems like it, an online course can easily become a “product” with more or less fixed content and fixed parameters within which participants can engage with one another. Given all the other technological possibilities nowadays, it is limiting. Also, traditional course management systems, like BlackBoard, are built on assumptions about traditional roles in a classroom–teacher overseeing students. This model doesn’t sit well with what I believe about the teaching and learning of writing. See that tag line at the top of the page, the one that reads “learning to write through community and conversation”? This is more than just a catch phrase for me. Rather, it describes fundamentally what I believe about writing–namely, that it is a social act. We cannot learn to write alone. It is about communication, conversation and community; it is about engaging with others. That’s what my writing courses are based on.
So, if by chance you were thinking an online course with me would allow you to lurk in the shadows of anonymity, you might want to think carefully about whether my course is the one for you. Another possible tag line I could have used for my courses is “teaching and learning out loud,” as everyone plays a vocal role and each person’s contribution is open for all to see and respond to. Again, it’s about conversation and community, and with both those things comes a measure of responsibility. Ok, that’s enough philosophy for now. Let’s get to the nuts and bolts of how my courses work. Read on.
Getting Set Up
My online courses, at the moment, make use of one main technology platform: WordPress (for blogging). Each participant in the course (myself included) will have a blog account on the learning.writing101.net network, which means you will have your own blog. You will also be a member of a second group blog—which I will call the “conversation center.” You’ll have to set your blog account up to get things going. Don’t worry if you are not even sure what a blog is, let alone if you know how to set it up, we’ll get to that.
So, let’s get started. What’s a blog or, more specifically, how will we use it for the course? Basically, you can think of it like your very own online notebook. It is essentially your own website (within the WordPress network I have set up) where you will do all your major writing for this course. Each entry (or post, as it’s called) on your blog is dated automatically and your name is attached to it. You have great creative control over your own blog, both in terms of its content and its design. It is your space. However, note that what you create there will be open for all to see. For the purposes of our class, your blog will have three basic categories of content: 1) Notes/Jottings/Early Drafts, 2) Ready for Review, 3) Final Portfolio. Each category designates how far along each piece of writing is. This will become clearer as you progress through the course. The majority of your work in the course will be in reading the blogs of other course participants (and commenting) and writing in your own blog.
To set up your course WordPress blog:
- Return to the main learning.writing101.net entry page.
- Select “Set Up Your Blog Site for the Course”
- Follow the on-screen directions, making sure that you provide a valid e-mail address that you plan to use for this course.
- Check your e-mail to activate your account and retrieve your password.
The other major area of the course where you will be an active participant is in the “conversation center” that I mentioned earlier. This is a group blog shared by everyone in the class. By setting up your primary blog as described above, you will automatically be added as an “author” to the “Conversation Center.” (So, you don’t have to do anything else to get this set up.) For our course we will use the conversation center to communicate with each other on a regular basis–to stay connected. It should truly become the center of the course activity.
Getting Oriented
Ok, once you have your course blog account all set up, you can begin participating fully in the course. The best bet to orient yourself is to login to checkout your own blog dashboard, where you manage your own blog–write new content, adjust settings, make design choices and so on. Then, visit the my blog on the network–the one I write for the course you are taking. This is where you will find all the lessons and assignments for the course as they are released. Of course, you might also want to hop on over to the conversation center to begin communicating with everyone else in the class.
Looking for the my blog with the course lessons and so on? Looking for the communication center? Find links to both below:
Click around the various areas of our blog network to see what’s what—just explore a little. Take a close look at that gray navigation bar at the top of the screen. Notice that it is present no matter where you are on the blog network. This will allow you to jump to where you need to go. The screencast below gives you a brief overview of this feature. Take a look. It will really help orient you.
Note: To see the video more easily click the little icon in the lower-right corner of the video window; this will play the video at full-screen.
Look, read, write. If you have questions, ask. Cheers.
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