This afternoon a friend called me up and asked if I could meet him for a coffee and take a look at a paper he was writing for his Masters program. This friend is one of the clearest thinking people I know, and he was feeling really spun around by the expectations of his program.
He started off by showing me the rubric provided for the piece of work and I immediately understood why he was feeling lost. It was completely vague, had several typos and no real overall suggestion of what the paper was meant to be about. He had still struggled through and written several thousand words, but felt really unclear.
This rubric, he said, was all they’d been given as guidance for the project. His program is online, and he has never met his professors, but in his interactions on the forum (where they’re expected to be posting comments weekly), he’s found the professors really aggressive and confrontational. He said that at one point someone asked for clarification on a task and was quite brutally shot down. He personally felt like each and every one of his comments was shredded and diminished, and his previous paper, which he’d been just as unclear about, had just gotten a passing grade.
An infrequent nostalgia. From Jennifer Pass on Flickr
Awful, right?
So this is what I wonder… I’m doing my Master’s now as well. Through COETAIL and assorted other qualifying courses. One of the key differences between COETAIL and other non-traditional programs is that I do still have a cohort who I meet with, in person, several times per course. I think this has been immensely valuable as a community-building element of the program, but additionally I think it has allowed for a much more varied range of learning experiences. No doubt this blog has still been the backbone of my work, but it still exists in a specific learning community.
I think the balance of in-person and online interactions serves other purposes as well. For one, I wonder whether my friend would have had such a sense of being lost in a program if he’d met his peers. And I wonder if his profs would have addressed everyone so aggressively if they were also expected to be meeting them in person.
Oh essay writing, how do I miss thee... Photo by Miranda Simpson, from Flickr
What knocked me down as well was the consideration that he was being expected to write essays. Formal, traditional essays. With specific word counts. Seriously, I’m sure many would argue this, but I just don’t quite see how presenting information in that format makes too much sense at this point. Especially when this essay he was writing was meant to be a reflective personal educational philosophy (from what we could deduce). I try to imagine what it would have been like for me if all of my work for this program had been formal essays and I shudder. I would have spent so much time working on the refined tenor required, that I don’t doubt I would have lost the value and reflective elements that this blog has served so well. A blog post can connect to anything else out there, use varied media and more. More than that, I understand the motive for presenting ideas with balance. But it’s in part the very subjective, personal nature of a blog that makes the ideas resonate for me. The goal is not to make your writing align with everyone else’s. Maybe it’s more of a buffet than a sausage factory. An essay…? Very static. The kind of document written to be read by a really thin slice of the pie. I wonder how long it will last as a dominant format of academic writing.
Anyways, the interaction made me very pleased to be completing this program in the way that I am.
Essays… Word counts… Oh my.
7 Responses to Midnight at the Sausage Factory
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I could not agree with you more! I was always really interested in post grad study, but the idea of essays really puts me off. I hate them and I find them so irrelevant to what I do.
“I would have spent so much time working on the refined tenor required, that I don’t doubt I would have lost the value and reflective elements that this blog has served so well.”
I also think that if I had to write every assignment as an essay that I would have written very different content and opinions, in an attempt to gain the approval of my professor.
I think this idea of a reflective blog is definitely the way forward.
Hi Jamie
I really want to continue onto the master’s program after completing COETAIL, but the thought of writing a thesis is terrifying!
So the other day I came up with an idea: What if I wrote my thesis over a number of blog posts? To avoid getting thesis posts mixed up with other posts, I would create a new blog. I would also plan it so that the first couple of posts formed the introduction, the next seven to eight posts formed the body and so on.
This I could pull off, but writing a 10,000 word thesis, I don’t like my chances.
Jamie Payne
Interesting proposition! Now you just have to find a school who will let you do it that way!
If you find one, btw…
Do you think SUNY would go for it?
@Jamie & Jamie
I think it’s a great idea to write as blog posts – but in the end it would probably have to be turned into a “standard” paper – meaning copied and pasted into one Word document for printing or pdf-ing. But, that’s not such a big deal – the hard part is the writing, right? I’ve actually seen a number of people write their dissertations (PhD dissertations) as a collection of blog posts, and I’ve seen people write books this way too. So a good strategy!
And I should also say, so glad the blog post format is working for you! I can’t imagine being asked to write an essay either! (Although a small group of us are writing a book chapter and it has a word count, so maybe that process is still in place in some institutions). Glad it’s not part of this program though!
Blogging is so much more rewarding that any essay I could have written. I actually think I’m pretty good at essay writing, but blogging really makes me think. I can play the game and give the professor exactly what he wants. But I find when I try to play the game on my blog (to gain a wider audience? Talk about something I don’t truly care about?) then my writing is flat. So I’ve stopped playing. And I’ve learned a lot more. Thanks for reminding me how lucky I am to have this style of learning with COETAIL.
Funny… I was talking with Mitch about this topic again just last night. There’s something really shallow about essay writing I think. I guess I consider that when I assign writing to my students, I think a lot about the authenticity of the audience. If there isn’t one, then the writing just seems to not be worth the effort in many cases. What strikes me as odd about the essay is how many hours I laboured over the writing, trying often, as Rebecca mentioned, to play the game and give the professor what I think they want to hear and in the end… I’ve spent forever composing something that’s likely going to be read once, by someone who (and yes this is cynical) may not be particularly interested, might skim a little, might be looking forward to finishing their marking so that they can go and watch General Hospital… Whatever. The point is when I contrast that with blog writing, or anything a bit more authentically purposed, I know no one is getting paid to read my blog (or not much anyhow…). Any audience, is going to be there because it’s something that speaks to them somehow. That means so much more.