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There is a bunch of stuff I want my students to know in my literature courses, but that I am not qualified or don’t want to teach- identifying countries on a map, translating key terms from other languages, grasping basic historical information, grammar.  Is there a low-stakes, self-directed, automated, and (maybe even) fun way of doing this?  I am proposing a Talk Session on developing and using online quizzes as games.

I’ve never used quizzes in my classes because I think there are far better ways to make sure students are engaged with the course content.  However, I have come to accept that sometimes we do learn simply by rote memorization. Too often though, quizzes just seem punitive and pointless.  You get one chance to get it right and then we move on.  After attending Katie Salen’s 2012 SXSW session, “Don’t Shoot the Player While they are Learning,” I began to think about how I could gather and create quizzes that taught students material that I wanted them to know, but that I didn’t want to spend class time on.  Also, I wanted to figure out how to make the quizzes feel like a low stakes game.  My approach:

• Students would not be graded on how well they did on any particular quiz.  They got a small number of points by taking any quiz 10 times over a period of at least 3 weeks.
• Students didn’t have to take the quizzes. They had many choices for assignments and could decide for themselves how to get points for the course.
• All of the quizzes were self directed, outside of class, and automated.

I was teaching courses on Contemporary American Ethnic Literature and Comics.  The initial quizzes I linked to or created were:

• A brief Spanish quiz using quotations from Junot Diaz’s Drown
• A bunch of online regional map quizzes
• A grammar quiz I helped create

Students could create quizzes as one of their assignments.  Some of the best ones I combined and let the other students take for points:

• An image-based quiz on Scott McCloud’s theories in Understanding Comics
• A culture, language, and history quiz for Maus

Some possible questions for the session:

• For what types of material is this quiz approach to learning effective?
• Could we create a massive bank of quizzes that students could access on their computers or mobile devices?
• What are possible problems with this approach?
• How would you assess the effectiveness of this approach?

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Materialist theories in the area of Composition in the last 10-12 years have reveled that much of the way we talk about what happens in our classrooms controls how we act toward our students, how they respond, and what the public sphere thinks about the work we do in classrooms. Linda Adler-Kassner argues in her 2008 book, The Activist WPA, that the way we frame our discussions of writers and writing can have an effect on everything from our day-to-day teaching to the funding that comes from up on high.

I currently teach a New Media Literacy course tied to the required beginning composition courses at Georgia State University. I am constantly embroiled in discussion over how much students already know about new media, and how much they could learn and actually use it in a classroom. These discussions happen IN my classroom, as well as with colleagues, and even with the gentleman I end up riding next to on a plane when I visit my brother for the holidays.

My proposal fits within the talk and play areas of the conference. I propose we have a session to discuss how ‘native’ our young adult learners are when it comes to digital and new media literacy. What do they bring to the classroom, and what is it important that they take away? As we have this open discussion, the group will sit in a circle, with a small gap between the first person and the last. Any time a person in the discussion says something negative about their work, they move to the end of the circle. This way, as we have the discussion, we can also visually see (and stay kinetically interested) what kinds of values we deploy more often as we discuss. The simple rules for this game, of course are up for discussion within the group.