All systems are set to go for the PCVI Summer Writing Seminar. Class begins on July 29. I’m in the final prep stage of the instructional design and Mark is recruiting for the class. We have twelve spots available for students, and as of July 11, eight of those are filled. I made a recruiting video up in Vermont a few weeks ago.
It felt good to talk about the class in the video. I had spent the previous few weeks nailing down a lot of the Google Sites work. It’s been an fascinating journey putting this thing together. The more I work on the instructional design, the more I learn.
I can neither confirm nor deny that we were awarded both of the grants from the Rhode Island Office of Veterans Services and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. This is due to the fact that our lovely friend, COVID-19, has punched a massive hole in the state’s finances. We need to wait until the budget is passed before we know where funds will be allocated. I have been informed that our grant applications were very competitive.
I have a few more chapters from our course text that I want to scan in for the students. That’s my job today. I need to polish up the course surveys and get those links embedded in the site and on the syllabus. It’s funny, in my mind I thought we had promised so much to funders in our grant applications, which to be fair, we did, it’s just not all dependent on student data. We still have the RIVETS.org page to build and stories to add to that site. When I looked at the grant apps to figure out what type of data I needed to collect, I was surprised to find that it was much simpler than I had imagined–I needed 12 vets, and by the end of the class, they needed to feel like they were better writers. At this point, I’ve worked on the class at such a granular level, it was easy for me to generate more specific questions about perceived writing skills and other measurable items from the class like digital literacy and expressive writing.