Portfolio Due: by midnight before after class

Go back over the work you’ve done for this unit, five assignments in all (you can access old assignments via the Calendar link, above):

1. Two independent ¶s on an educational YouTube video, from Class 1.2. Choose one to revise and publish in your portfolio.
2. 2-¶ deepening analysis of an educational video, from Class 2.1
3. 3-¶ comparative analysis, introducing a second video as a point of comparison, from Class 2.2
4. 2-¶ sequence quoting a source as a point of reference in your own analysis, from Class 3.1
5. 1-¶ essay introduction, from Class 3.2

Portfolio Format

Revise and polish the 5 HW assignments, treating each as a separate piece of writing. Revise—or even rewrite from scratch—with the aim of making each assignment really shine. Head up your portfolio with a clear, boldface label (“Paragraph Portfolio”) and head up each of the 5 assignments with an appropriate label (“2-¶ description,” etc.) Continue reading →

Quotation as Call-and-Response

Read “Online Learning, Personalized,” a 2011 NYTimes article by Somini Sengupta discussing the impact that Khan Academy videos are making on the way math is taught both in and out of school.

As you read, I’d like you to focus on the mechanics of quotation in this article. Highlight passages where Sengupta quotes or otherwise cites the views of other people. What (if anything) does she do when quoting someone for the first time? How does she change her phrasing when a person has been mentioned already?

How do these interview subjects help Sengupta to structure her article? (You may find this question easier to answer if you use different colors of highlighter to mark passages where Sengupta quotes and paraphrases each of her different sources.)

Paste answers in the comment section below. For this exercise, probably best that you wait to read what others have written until after you’ve posted your own ideas.

Essay Introduction

For the very first HW assignment, I asked you to introduce your video by describing what it does and how. But that’s not the same as introducing an essay. An essay intro is an invitation to the reader. Like a trailer for a movie, it helps readers decide whether this is something they want to read. So the most important task is conveying a sense of what the reader will learn by (1) defining the topic and (2) voicing a thesis claim about that topic. But you should also consider how to motivate your reader’s interest: why is this an important topic for discussion? How will your thesis, once proven, change the world? In short, what is at stake in this essay?

Two distinct ways to approach this challenge:

1. Open by introducing your essay’s principal source, briefly characterizing it in such a way as to embody the larger issue at stake in the essay.
2. Start by motivating interest in the essay’s larger issue, waiting until the first body ¶ to introduce your essay’s principal source.

For class, write an essay introduction, pasting it into the comment space below. If you choose option 2, above, include the first sentence of the ¶ that would follow after, so we can see how you plan to engineer the transition from an intro with a general focus to an essay body with a focus principally on just one source.

They Say, I Say

For Lecture this week and last I had you read short pieces discussing (1) the teaching strategies in Vsauce and (2) the value of Khan Academy for teaching classroom math. For today’s assignment, I’d like you to use one of those articles as a point of reference in your own analysis.

Start by re-reading both articles, looking for an idea or opinion that you’d like to respond to. Maybe you agree or disagree—or maybe the quote strikes you as explaining something you hadn’t understood before. Several options (of many possible):

1. Use a quotation as a starting point: “Stevens says X, but … ”
2. Bring in a quotation to solve a problem / confirm an insight of your own: “This approach to video education is advocated by Michael Stevens of VSauce fame….”

Structurally, the choice here is between moving from the article’s ideas to yours, or from your ideas ideas to the article. If you opt for A, cover the article in ¶1, and use ¶2 to introduce your video evidence that complicates or confirms his account. Alternatively, if you follow option B, use ¶1 to present your video, ending the ¶ with an insight about how it works or a puzzle about why it works. Then use ¶2 to introduce the article as confirming the insight or solving the puzzle. Alternatively—a third option—move from your ideas to the article and back in a sequence of three ¶s.

To provide an evidentiary basis for your ideas, you will need to select a YouTube educational video. So think about all the videos you’ve watched over the past few weeks, and the ideas they’ve stirred in you, and then look at a few others that pop up in YouTube’s “up next” column. Make sure you cite key details from the video OR from your experience watching the video as evidence for your account of how/why this video teaches (or fails to teach) the viewer.

Who are you quoting? If you use a quote or idea from Michael Stevens, be sure to introduce HIM as your source. On the other hand, if you use a quote or idea from Jessica Lahey, author of the article on VSauce, be sure to introduce HER as your source.

Source Citation: Make sure to give an MLA-style citation for any quotes. This is our first chance to discuss MLA citation, so it’s helpful for me to see what you already know.

Paragraph Transitions

Two principles of strong paragraphing:

1. Each ¶ should have a clear sense of mission: what it does and (therefore) what it leaves for other ¶s to do.
2. Each ¶ should present its mission as responding to the prior one in some specific way.

There are lots of ways for a new ¶ to respond to the prior ¶. Here are several (click here for a more complete list):

• Explain: make sense of something described just above.
• Build on: introduce the next step in a logical argument.
• New angle: for example, you might consider sound after focusing on visuals.
• Zoom in: look at an instance of a trend or pattern noted just above.
• Zoom out: name the pattern which the prior ¶’s topic is an example of.

Two further transitions used when telling a story:

• Result: what happened next.
• Lateral shift in space: “Meanwhile. back at the ranch…”

Reading

To provide us with an example for discussion, read the following, from an article published last year in The Atlantic

What Teachers Can Learn From Vsauce’s YouTube Show

by Jessica Lahey, OCT 28, 2014

When I told my sons, ages 11 and 15, that I would be interviewing a series of unconventional and inspiring educators about their teaching methods, they insisted—nay, demanded—that I sit down with them and watch their favorite teacher, Michael Stevens, host of the wildly popular YouTube education channel Vsauce.

They queued up their favorite episodes, “What If The Earth Stopped Spinning?” “What If the Moon Was a Disco Ball?” and “Why Are Things Creepy?” These particular videos have been viewed an average of 4 million times each, so my sons are clearly not the only Vsauce enthusiasts out there. Far from it—Stevens’ Vsauce channel boasts nearly 8 million subscribers and 700 million views.

Three hours and two bowls of popcorn later, I’d become yet another number in the Vsauce subscription and view counter, and I’d also pieced together some theories on what makes Michael Stevens such an effective and popular teacher.

Stevens understands that the best teachers don’t just hurl vast shovelfuls of wisdom at their students, hoping some of it sticks as it whizzes by. Great teachers know that education is a long game, and much of the time, the lesson at hand is not the final destination but an opportunity to contextualize and support future learning. Stevens does hurl a lot of information at his viewers, but he also creates a massive net for his audience so they will be able to catch and hold on to his teaching.

For example, in the video, “What If Everyone Jumped at Once?” (14 million views), Stevens opens with a simple, yet intriguing (not to mention highly clickable) question. While he dangles the promise of an answer for his viewers (which—spoiler alert!—turns out to be “not much”), arriving at an answer isn’t really his goal. During his seven-minute examination of the question, Stevens bushwhacks through a wide range of related topics, including the population and mass of the earth, geology, geography, seismology, the etymology of the word “decimate,” Dunbar’s number, Newton’s Third Law, human lifespan, and the collective and individual power of human beings—in this case of this particular video, the power of Felicia Day.

Stevens refers to these zigs and zags across disciplines as “hooks,” or opportunities to build, reinforce, and retain, new knowledge. He builds on the knowledge he imparts with new knowledge, and before you know it, you’ve learned a lot about a huge range of subjects. That knowledge is durable because he’s connected it to real-world contexts. You don’t learn from a Vsauce video because you put out a lot of effort to do so; you learn because Stevens makes the information matter. This, Stevens explained to me, is his cardinal rule: “to teach so that people don’t even know that they are learning.”

[Lahey goes on to list several other educational strategies discussed by Stevens during their interview. You may find a useful insight or contrasting viewpoint, so please do check out the full article.]

Exercise

There are six paragraphs in Lahey’s article. On a piece of scratch paper, write down the type of transition used by Lahey at the start of paragraphs #2 through #6 (for types of transition, see the two lists at the top of this page).

Before pasting your answer in the comments, read the answers given by other students. If you see an answer you agree with, click the reply button on their answer and say “I Agree”. If you don’t see anyone who’s given your answer already, use the main comment box instead.

Purposeful Comparison

“Write a paper comparing and contrasting …” When I got this sort of assignment back in high school, I’d find myself wondering “Why? What’s the point? Is this just an exercise to demonstrate my intellectual agility, or am I comparing these two poems/stories/laws to actually learn something?”

The answer, of course, is that you should be learning something any time you engage in comparative analysis. But teachers will often leave it up to you to work out the goal of the comparison. After all, to voice the comparison’s goal is to state the resulting essay’s thesis and most teachers leave the choice of thesis up to the student.

For today’s homework, I’d like you to identify a video on YouTube that offers an illuminating point of comparison for one of the three videos we watched for class 1.2: Vi Hart, Nerdwriter, or Idea Channel. Two strategies for choosing a video:

1. You might find a second video that is similar in many respects but different in just one crucial quality, allowing you to estimate the significance of that quality. For example, two science-oriented video series with nerdy but personable hosts, one produced in front of a green screen, the other in a different location every week.
2. You might find a second video that is different in almost every respect except one key factor. In this case, illuminating insights come from discovering that the significance of that key similarity, despite the many differences. For example, you might learn something about the importance of rapid delivery in your science-oriented video by comparing it to the equally rapid pace of a video series focused on HBO’s Game of Thrones.
   

   Assignent Format

   Here’s one way to do this assignment, in three paragraphs:

   1. A ¶ introducing one of the videos. What makes it interesting, worthy of our attention? Is it typical? Unusual? In what way? This ¶ is also your opportunity to give a brief but vivid description of the video: its purpose, approach. Don’t feel you need to tell us everything, but just 3-5 vital details, enough so we could pick your video out of a lineup.
   2. A ¶ discussing the video you’re introducing for comparison (open with a strong transition sentence introducing this instance: “By contrast, …” or “But this isn’t the only way to … ” or the like). This ¶ should focus almost exclusively on the second video, noting its many similarities but emphasizing its one crucial difference—or its many differences but one crucial similarity.
   3. Another standard-length ¶ pressing home an insight that aries as result of this comparison. It may be an insight about your first video—how it works, why it’s so effective. But it may be an insight about videos more generally—what makes them such great medium for education, or perhaps why they are ultimately limited in what they can achieve.
      

   At the end of your piece, please include links to the two videos you’re comparing.

Deepening Analysis

Last time for HW you wrote two paragraphs discussing one of three educational videos. This time I’d like you to create a 2-¶ sequence where the second ¶ bounces in some way off the first one. I’m especially interested in seeing one of the “Analytic” rather than one of the “Narrative” transitions from our list of ¶ transitions.

To make the discussion more lively, please choose a video to write on from any of the thousands (millions?) of educational pieces on YouTube.

Several guidelines:

• For clarity of formatting, please put two returns between the ¶s.
• For clarity of understanding, try to phrase the opening sentence of your new ¶ so as to signal to the reader how it improves on, or complicates, or perhaps even undercuts the point you made in your earlier analysis.
• Do include a fresh link to the video you’re discussing.
• Finally, beneath your video link, name the paragraph transition you see between your ¶s.

Abstract Claims & Concrete Details

Our goal this unit is to figure out how educational videos work—and how and where they fail to work. As a first step to that deeper understanding, for HW today you will write two paragraphs, each of which identifies a one key quality in a video.

Three videos to watch:

• Vi Hart, Hexaflexagons
• Nerdwriter, Inside Out: Emotional Theory Comes Alive
• Idea Channel, 3 Fallacies For Election Season!

Please watch all three, so you can provide smart feedback for other students when we meet for class. After watching all three, pick ONE to write on and watch it a second time. Make two lists: one of abstract qualities (frenetic, intellectual, etc.) and one of concrete details (focus on the speaker’s face, jazz music in background, etc.). Pick out two qualities from the first list and make them each the focus of a ¶ filled with details from the second list.

Paragraph structure:

• One Sentence: After briefly identifying which video you’re writing about, open the ¶ with a claim identifying one of its key qualities. Don’t be too self-critical: you can (and should) experiment with re-naming this quality after you finish the next step.
• Three to four sentences: Flesh out the claim by pointing to specific concrete details that substantiate the video’s “frenetic pacing” or whatever claim you’re working on.

Turn your paragraphs in by pasting them into the comment box below. (If you don’t see a comment box, bring your laptop to class.) Leave TWO returns between your ¶s to make the formatting look nice.

Introductions

Course Structure

• 4 Units, with gradual increase in essay length and complexity. No midterm or final exam, but there may be a group project w a focus on visual persuasion.
• HW and essays: assigned and (usually) turned in via this course website.

Core Dogma

Vivid description makes readers experience evidence for themselves.

In-Class Exercise

Discuss two YouTube educational videos

• Vi Hart Hexaflexagons
• Nerdwriter Inside Out: Emotional Theory Comes Alive