Matthew Magnuson
Short Writing Assignment for Students
2003 Workshop on Improving Student Writing
Center for Writing Excellence
Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching
INTRODUCTION FOR FACULTY TO THIS SHORT WRITING ASSIGNMENT
The following assignment is designed for IMS 201 - Information Studies in the Digital Age. The goal of the assignment is to have students record thoughts and concepts related to class and to give them the opportunity to expand on their ideas. Ideally, I hope that this assignment will help my students “generate, extend, deepen, and clarify [their] thinking” (Bean 104) about some of the variety of topics that are presented in class. I will also use the assignment as a type of informal barometer to measure interest and understanding of course topics.
IMS 201 – Information Studies in the Digital Age
Short Assignment
Focus and Connection to course goals
This semester-long activity asks you to keep a double-entry notebook to record and reflect on the materials and the progress that they are making in learning about research skills and the research process, web development, and advances in information technology. It addresses the following course goals:
- Exploring a variety of themes where new communication and information technologies have affected the community, the political and education spheres, and the view of information as a commodity.
- Becoming adept at organizing, retrieving, evaluating and disseminating information.
Learning objective
The objective of this notebook is to:
- give you a space to bring up and explore questions and issues about our class
- have you actively focus on course discussions and materials
- make connections from the course content and your personal lives
- help you generate, extend, deepen, and clarify thinking
Process
- You should bring the notebook to class daily and keep it readily available so that these entries may be written at any time during the class period. All entries (on both sides of the notebook) should be dated.
- On the left side of the notebook, you will record important, confusing, interesting, or controversial statements from lecture, readings, discussions, etc. Occasionally I will give you a prompt for you to respond to, but otherwise you are free to make entries on whatever topics related to class that you see fit (whether interesting, confusing, controversial, or disagreeable).
- On the right side of the notebook, you will discuss and further elaborate on the statements that were written on the left side. This could take the form of further questions, an exploratory explanation, or any other commentary that the student feels necessary. This part of the notebook will be completed as nightly homework. The writing here is informal and does not need to be highly polished.
- The note books will be collected every other week on Thursday and returned the following Tuesday
Criteria
- Regular left-side entries – Was there an entry made everyday?
- Substantive right-side entries – Do the entry demonstrate exploration issues and questions? Do the entries make connections to course materials and content when appropriate?
- Length - Is there at least one page of notes for each class period?
- The entries for an entire day will be graded with a √+, √, √-, or -.
Sample
- Please see sample page to give you a better idea of how entries might be completed
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