This Spring, WIC will host three workshops. Read more about and register for each event here!

PERUSALL WORKSHOP, PART I 

Dr. Ciara Kidder (Ecampus Instructor, College of Liberal Arts, School of Psychological Science) will be leading our first workshop of the term. Register for the event here. Learn more below:

Talk title: “Using Perusall to engage students with readings”

Date, time, place: Friday, April 12th, at Noon via Zoom

Description: In this lunch conversation, Dr. Ciara Kidder (Psychology) will talk about how she uses the social annotating software Perusall to engage students with readings.  Through Perusall, students annotate readings collectively, with each student commenting on the reading itself and responding to other students’ responses. Dr. Kidder will discuss how she uses Perusall to have students practice summarizing information, making connections to other materials, and explaining themselves and their thinking.

PERUSALL WORKSHOP, PART II

Angelique Pearson of Oregon State’s Ecampus will provide a technical support session for instructors interested in Perusall. Attendance of the previous Perusall workshop is NOT required for this workshop. 

Register for the event here. Learn more below: 

Event title: Persuall Workshop, Part II: Technical Support

Date, time, place: Wednesday, April 17^th from 3:00-4:30 via Zoom

Description: Ecampus Course Development and Training Specialist Angelique Pearson will be available to provide technical support for instructors wanting to use Perusall in their classes. Whether you already use Perusall or are looking to implement it in your classroom, this workshop will provide the guidance you’re looking for. 

WORKSHOP: REDUCING WRITING ANXIETY IN THE CLASSROOM 

Georgia Wright and Casey Dawson (WIC Program Graduate Intern and Assistant, School of Writing, Literature, and Film) will be hosting a workshop on how to reduce anxiety around writing in the classroom. 

Register for the workshop here. Learn more below:

Date, time, place: Wednesday May 22nd, from 3:00 – 4:00 PM via Zoom

Description: Research shows that low-stakes writing exercises in the classroom provide many benefits to students, including better course knowledge retention. But negative experiences with academic writing, perfectionist tendencies, or low confidence can make many students feel anxious about writing in any context. In this co-led workshop, Georgia Wright and Casey Dawson will discuss student writing anxieties and share strategies for making your classroom an inviting, judgment-free space for writing. Attendees will gain practical tools to improve their students’ relationship to writing in the classroom and beyond, and to increase student participation in writing activities.

Nominations for the 2024 COWA’s are due at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 30th, 2024!

Read more about the nomination process and access the nomination form below.

WIC CULTURE OF WRITING AWARDS IN THE DISCIPLINES 2024

Every spring term, the Writing Intensive Curriculum program hosts the WIC Culture of Writing Awards in the Disciplines (COWA). These awards promote an academic culture at OSU that values the teaching, practice, and modeling of writing excellence across the disciplines. WIC’S COWA encourage our undergraduates and broader community to value the unique qualities of excellent writing within the disciplines.

Winners receive a $100 prize, $50 of which comes from the WIC Program, and $50 from the nominating unit. Winners will also be invited to submit their papers to ScholarsArchive@OSU, Oregon State’s thesis and dissertation archive.

HOW TO NOMINATE STUDENT PAPERS FOR COWA

Any paper that was written by an OSU student for an undergraduate course (including non-WIC courses) is eligible for COWA nomination. COWA nominees are nominated by participating departments. While the nomination process takes place within each unit, COWA awardees are selected by faculty within each discipline.

To nominate a student paper for our Culture of Writing Awards:

• Complete the nomination form and submit to Caryn Stoess no later than 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 30th, 2024. (To receive the award certificate in time for your college’s spring awards event, submit this form as early as possible and include the event information/date.)
• After the award is processed, the $100 prize — $50 from WIC and $50 from the unit index noted on the nomination form — will be deposited in the recipient’s student account. Winners who graduate prior to June 2023 will be mailed a check.

NOMINATING TEAM PROJECTS

If your unit would like to recognize a collaboratively-written paper, contact WIC Director Sarah Perrault (sarah.perrault@oregonstate.edu) for more information.

Dr. Scott Graham’s “AI Has Entered the Chat: Promise, Peril, and the Future of Writing in Higher Ed” Talk (Recording Linked) 

Instructors and students alike are increasingly aware of the ways generative AI technologies are changing writing and higher education. This term, WIC invited Dr. Scott Graham (University of Texas-Austin) to discuss how instructors can navigate uses and misuses of artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom. In “AI Has Entered the Chat: Promise, Peril, and the Future of Writing in Higher Ed,” Dr. Graham, who uses AI to study health and bioscience communication, reviews the many ways students and instructors alike are using generative AI technologies (including Chat-GPT) in and beyond the classroom. 

In the talk, he highlights potential benefits and drawbacks of AI use, and shares ways that instructors might employ large language models (LLMs) as an electronic pedagogical resource in the writing classroom, as well as tips for designing assessments that facilitate students’ learning about the writing process. He also discusses the many limits and drawbacks of this tech, including the ways that LLMs produce false information and sources through “hallucinations,” as well as the dangerous data collection and storage methods used by major AI tech companies. 

You can watch the recording of Dr. Graham’s talk here. 

Dr. Scott Graham’s workshop “ChatGPT in the Classroom: Practicalities & Pedagogies” (No Recording Available) 

Following his talk on using generative AI responsibly in the classroom, Dr. Scott Graham hosted a workshop titled “ChatGPT in the Classroom: Practicalities & Pedagogies.” In the workshop, he explained how generative AI technologies like Chat-GPT gather data and create outputs based on that data; he then led attendees through various prompt generation exercises using Chat-GPT, discussing the tool’s limitations and capacities along the way. 

In the first exercise, attendees prompted Chat-GPT to summarize a book or reading they had recently assigned to students, and then shared their observations on the AI’s outputs with one another. Dr. Graham then reviewed the basics of prompt engineering, the practice of developing inputs for the strongest possible outputs from generative AI tools. In the following exercise, attendees tested the limits of Chat-GPT’s ability to localize its outputs by prompting the tool to craft a letter related to issues in Corvallis and the Oregon State community.

This quarter, we were fortunate to have S. Scott Graham on campus for a talk, “AI has Entered the Chat: Promise, Peril, and the Future of Writing in Higher Ed,” as well as a faculty workshop, “ChatGPT in the Classroom: Practicalities & Pedagogies.” Both events were engaging and informative, and you can see the recording of the talk here. You can also read an overview of the talk and workshop here.  

In fall, I mentioned that extra funding is allowing WIC to offer our Faculty Seminar several times this year. This term, 18 faculty from 13 schools across 8 colleges completed the Winter 2024 Faculty Seminar–you can read about them here.  

We will be finishing the ‘23-’24 year with two more Seminar sessions in Spring, and we have a few spots left. If you are interested in Seminar but have not been nominated by your unit head, please direct them to the Faculty Seminar page and ask them to email your name to WIC Director Sarah Perrault (sarah.perrault@oregonstate.edu). 

This spring, we will also have our traditional spring workshop series. It will feature a workshop on how to use Perusall, a tech support session for Perusall, and another on creating an inviting and fear-free writing environment in your classes. Dates, times, and registration information for the events can be found here.
 
Finally, spring will be the time to nominate student papers for the Culture of Writing Awards, so please keep an eye out for exemplary student writing. Winning papers must be in the major, but do not have to have been written for a WIC class.

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by Casey Dawson, WIC Graduate Assistant

TOP ROW: Dennis Bennettt (WIC Assistant Director), Casey Dawson (WIC Graduate Assistant), Sarah Perrault (WIC Director), Mike Blundgren, Jay Penry

SECOND ROW: Teresa Ashford, Ciara Kidder, Jenny Hutchings, Randall Palmer, Ingrid Arocho

THIRD ROW: Jenny Jackson, Lauren Seiffert , Mike Pavol, Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez (Ecampus Senior Instructional Design Specialist), Staci Bronson

FOURTH ROW: Stacy Rosenberg, Sam Logan, Sabine Huemer, Kristen Yax, Caiden Marcus-Brist 

BOTTOM ROW: Farid Bouya, Kenton Hokanson

This term, the WIC team hosted the latest round of our Faculty Seminar, a 5-week course for WIC faculty across OSU’s campuses to develop practical skills for teaching writing in their disciplines. Our weekly sessions included lessons on understanding the goals of a writing intensive course, how to evaluate student writing, designing summative writing assignments, and more.

The WIC team congratulates the Winter 2024 Seminar cohort on their completion of the course!

Along with Sarah Tinker Perrault, this year’s WIC team moderators and assistants included WIC Graduate Assistant Casey Dawson, WIC Graduate Intern Georgia Wright, WIC Assistant Director Dennis Bennett, and Ecampus’ Senior Instructional Design Specialist Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez. Nadia worked with our Seminar cohort on how to integrate writing exercises and assignments (including peer review and group discussions) effectively in the online teaching environment.

Across Canvas discussion boards and Zoom breakout groups, our participants engaged each other in conversations on the challenges of teaching writing today while sharing their own strategies for teaching, assigning, and assessing writing in their respective disciplines.

Congrats again to this term’s WIC Faculty Seminar graduates:

• Farid Bouya (Math)
• Sabine Huemer (Psychology)
• Sam Logan (Kinesiology)
• Randall Palmer (business)
• Kristen Yax (Psychology)
• Stacy Rosenberg (Forest Ecosystems and Society)
• Michael Pavol (Kinesiology)
• Ingrid Arocho (Civil Construction and Engineering)
• Ciara Kidder (Psychology) 
• Kenton Hokanson (Microbiology) 
• Jenny Hutchings (Atmospheric sciences)
• Staci Bronson (Integrative bio)
• Chris Bulgren (Music education)
• Caiden Marcus-Brist (Business)
• Lauren Seiffert (Arts, Media, and Technology)
• Jay Penry (Kinesiology)
• Jenny Jackson (Nutrition)
• Teresa Ashford (Human Development and Family Science)

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MORE INFO ABOUT WIC FACULTY SEMINAR

Faculty are nominated to attend Seminar by their unit heads and receive a $500 honorarium for their participation. For the first time, WIC will be hosting Faculty Seminar during all 3 terms of the academic year, including 2 sections (one in-person at the Corvallis campus, and one virtual) this spring! 

Interested in attending spring’s Seminar but haven’t been nominated by your unit head? Direct them to the Faculty Seminar page and ask them to email your name to WIC Director Sarah Perrault (sarah.perrault@oregonstate.edu). 

Click this link to learn more about WIC Faculty Seminar.