Becoming a Collegial Mentor

Let’s be honest, the real reason I’ve gotten around to typing up these why/what blurbs has not been for my students (bad Shelley, baaaad Shelley); but, instead, for a group of part-time faculty in a program that is helping to “train” them to teach ENG102 (our second semester FYC course) online. Let me start by saying that I have thoroughly enjoyed working with my part-time colleagues. This solidifies what I’ve pretty much already know, I really dig doing professional development stuff. Although I’ve already done a bunch of professional development activities (as organizer, coordinator, facilitator, as well as participant), and my dissertation could come out of a college of education ed/tech department just as easily as it is emerging from rhetoric and composition, this experience wraps it.

So, I constructed a “master” online ENG102 course to share with the part-time folks. Although they are not required to use it, members of the department were explicit that we did not want to force our part-time faculty to do anything, the all of them are rolling out with the course as I designed it with minor changes. For example, most of them switched it from APA style to MLA style. Another switched from using Furl to del.icio.us as the social bookmarking tool. And of course, they caught some of my typos and other surface features (I warned them!). But I was surprised that they more or less accepted it whole sale. On the other hand, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I remember what I was like as a new TA…

Besides constructing the online course, I met with them, along with some of our CTL folks, to discuss using the course management system and general online teaching and learning strategies. Some were in a program that required them to take an online course about teaching online (and they were compensated for this work as well). I also tried to develop supporting documents that gave ideas of the what, whys, and wherefores of the course. Finally, I developed a note/timeline document that had suggestions of what types of announcements to send during what points of the semester.

As I developed the notes/timeline document I decided to work in various techno-tips. Some of these tips would explain various technologies the course required (like social bookmarking) as well as some writing specific things (like understanding the differences between doc, rtf, and pdf files). My current list includes (and I will eventually post) the following tips:

• Why/What Furl/Social Bookmarking


• Computer File Suffixes


• The Web vs. Databases vs. Blogs


• Personal Portals


• Digg It


• MS Word Tricks (page set up/formatting, pagebreaks, paragraph formatting, headers/footers & styles/formatting taskbar)


• RSS Aggregators


• Idea Visualization Tolls (MS Word, Gliffy, Cmap)


• Library Thing


• Document Sharing


• Document Storage


• Internet Browser Toolbars & Extensions


• Future Projects

These topics emerged out of the stuff I’ve found myself repeatedly explaining to students over the years. I’ll be tagging them with the creative commons tag; however, I hope that my various readers locate them on the web and find them useful in their classes.

January 29 2007 | Posted in Techno Tips