I just finished creating a trailfire presentation for my business writing students tomorrow (summary available here) — or, rather, today, as it’s 2:00 am. Why am I up so late? Due to having a lot of grading left to do and accidentally sleeping so much on Saturday, when I had scheduled time to grade. Guess I was suffering from sleep debt. But, back to the trailfire presentation: covering some del.icio.us, collaborative writing software, online presentation software, blogs, citation software, and online pre-writing software.
So, I’m excited to show my students some online software they can use to collaborate or research with while they work on their proposals and group reports/projects/presentations. It should be a fun class period tomorrow, except perhaps while we’re talking about academic honesty… I haven’t really covered it yet in class, and it looks like I should have. I had a few students not quote properly in their last assignment — as in, they didn’t use quotation marks or even note that it was a direct quote. I don’t think it was intentional (er, well, malicious), but it was obvious in a few cases it wasn’t their own words. Luckily, though, they get a chance to revise when they turn it in for their individual portfolios, and this gives us a great chance to have a conversation about academic conventions and workplace expectations. (The assignment is graded informally.) It also gives me a chance to think about transfer and how I made a very poor assumption that some of the skills covered in first-year composition would transfer over well to other forms of writing in other classes.
Now, it’s off to get a few hours of sleep.
Too cool – and will you please demo this at the Instructor meeting tomorrow? You could bring your laptop to the faculty lounge.
And here’s something I notice – when I follow through this and get to sites I already use – such as Google.Docs – the Trailfire shows MY Google.docs rather than just the standard Google.Docs home page. I guess I know why – because I am currently logged in to Google. But it’s kind of surprising but also disconcerting to see my own stuff up there.
Also, sometimes Trailfire links are slow to load the next page. Is that just a function of the internet speed in a particular location or the speed of a particular computer?
Sara,
Thanks. Yeah, if you’re on a public computer and no one is logged into those sites, then it won’t be a problem with it showing personal information. Mine was logged in when I showed students, which was handy because then I could show them some features of google docs with someone I’ve already done.
I think the problem with Trailfire links being slow would have to be a mixture of the computer you’re on, the network you’re on, and how much traffic Trailfire is getting.