Earlier this year, I participated in a conversation on collective feedback during a Faculty Office Hours session (an online chat for teachers of professional and technical writing). Collective feedback, a strategy examined by Lisa Melonçon (University of South Florida, @lmeloncon on…
Category: Bedford Bits
A Grace Period Update
Recently, several colleagues have asked me about my grace period, which is part of my late policy on student work. Their interest encouraged me to write an update on how it’s been working. I began using a grace period in…
Where to Find Public Domain Videos
Public Domain video from Library of CongressDuck and Cover! by the Federal Civil Defense Administration If you ask your students to create video projects, today’s post is for you. Showing students where to find public domain videos will give them…
Where to Find Public Domain Resources
Public Domain Illustration of Frederick Douglass In my last post, I shared details on Encouraging the Use of Public Domain Assets in student projects. Public domain images, video, text, and audio provide free-to-use, copyright-free resources that students can incorporate in…
Encouraging the Use of Public Domain Assets
Image credit: NASA If your students are creating projects that include images, video, and audio, public domain resources can contribute to amazing work that avoids many of the headaches of using copyright-protected assets. Since public domain assets are free of…
A Feedback Policy with Unintended Positive Results
Earlier this year, I shared my strategy to bribe students by offering extra points for those who turned in their work before Spring Break. I had some success, but there is still room for improvement. I am currently teaching a…
Design Principles from Career Field to the Writing Classroom
Students typically know about design in their own career fields. Civil engineering majors, for instance, typically know what a good bridge, a well-designed intersection, or an efficiently designed airport looks like. They may not be able to design and build…
Writing a Course Manual
I am currently revising my Technical Writing Course Manual, in preparation for my summer session course, and I want to share the document and how it has worked this week. I first created the manual, using a Google Document, for…
Political Memes from the Internet to Protest Posters
As I have written in my last two posts, I presented on the ways that image macro memes (the memes that usually consist of an image and a text caption) at the Computers and Writing Conference in June. Specifically, I…
Image Macro Meme Makers
LOLcat defining Politics, with captions, Politics: n – frum Greek. Poli – many, tics – blood sucking parasites Last week, I shared a Political Meme Scavenger Hunt activity, one of the resources that I also shared at the Computers and…