Take Your Time

[Margaret F]

On my tumblr page titled Take Your Time--a title I've used before, long before Olafur Eliasson got to town--I focused my tumblr project on the question how can I more effectively help my academic writing students find and articulate a research question that is individual and meaningful. The project has seven parts, corresponding to the dashboard options of text, link, photo, etcetera, and its overall address is below.

As listed with links below, the first part you'll see, working from present back into the past, is my "chat," which I created by using summize.com to find a tweet using the search term "academic writing." What I found exposes my delusion that I've "caught up" with technology these past three weeks...a professor is having his students "co-writ[e] via Skype chat." Imagine how that makes me feel. Next you'll see or rather hear my "audio," musings recorded via cell phone on the notion of "discoveries." Then you'll find two parts of a video, interrupted by a photo and a quote, that were recorded in my summer school academic writing course, one right after the other and only accidentally divided into two parts because I got distracted by listening to my students' responses. I asked them first to write, then share, how they felt as they completed and on this night, turned in for grading their "main documented essays" (though they have the opportunity for one more rewrite after they get their grades papers back). I like their honesty--two responses were very positive, and three were less so but each in a different way. However, I also neglected to move closer to the students at the end of the table, so alas their voices are less audible. A sequence of quotes that I share with students, sometimes using them for text-on-texting, follows, and they are as much for my reassurance that confusion, uncertainty, "...aware[ness] primarily of the forces involved," and questions are at the center of writers', artists', philosophers', and our work. Then comes a text, describing my inquiry, and last is a link to a relevant academic writing article from the National Writing Project archive.

CHAT
AUDIO
VIDEO 1
IMAGE
QUOTE 1
VIDEO
QUOTE 2, QUOTE 3. QUOTE 4, QUOTE 5
TEXT
LINK

Since this question, how can I more effectively help students find and articulate research questions that are individual and meaningful, is perpetual for me, I eagerly welcome your shared thoughts and experiences. You can find my project at: http://margaretf.tumblr.com/