Authorship 2.0 » teaching

An Ecological Perspective on Web 2.0 in Education

Marielle — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:24:53 +0000

Earlier this year, blogger Andy Carvin issued a provocation: “Web 2.0 and Education, Hot or Not?” He went on to discuss reactions within the education community to Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, including a blog started by Ann Collier called Why we like Web 2.0… Carvin’s response was a call for educators to share what they dislike about Web 2.0 as well in order to gain credibility with critics.

My approach to this issue is to try to break free of either/or thinking about whether Web 2.0 is good or bad for society and/or education and focus on context of use and conditions of value. Such an ecological approach considers how the affordances of a particular medium might help people achieve specific purposes or address particular pedagogical goals under certain circumstances, while also considering its limitations. For example, if people understand how to conduct an efficient web search and evaluate the reliability of sources, then the benefits of having access to the thoughts, ideas, and creative achievements of millions of newly self-published authors may outweigh the challenges of sifting through them to find the worthiest ones. And the potential benefits of being able to interact so easily with people and their ideas without restrictions on time or distance are enormous.

The social web can offer a great deal of value as a learning environment, under the right conditions. Web 2.0 media such as blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions can help developing writers build a sense of audience and purpose as they interact in writing with others around their ideas. In the context of effective instruction, this sort of authentic written communication can potentially help students learn how to write better than typical classroom composition activities in which the sole purpose of writing is to prove competence to a teacher. However, Web 2.0 media do not inherently provide instruction; in order to achieve such results, teachers need to guide students toward learning the rhetoric and applying the conventions of academic discourse, with clear expectations and reliable accountability mechanisms. They also need to provide writing tasks and prompts that engage students in genuine authorship involving critical and creative thinking about substantive issues, works of literature or art, or other meaningful content that has relevance to students and to society at large. Discussing the value of Web 2.0 for authors as well as audiences, considering both challenges and opportunities, essentially reframes the debate about Keen’s polemical argument. Rather than listing “why we like (or do not like) the social web,” it might be even more compelling to explain “when we like the social web and why.”

Authorship for Learning

Marielle — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:06:41 +0000

When I use the term “authorship,” I am referring to the practice of writing or otherwise creating an original text in any medium. For example, one might author a story, an essay, a book, a message, a diagram, a video, a multimedia presentation, a blog, a podcast, etc.

I believe that authorship is an important vehicle for learning. Teachers often ask students to write, but such activities do not always engage students in true authorship.

This concept map that I authored with MindMeister elaborates on what I mean…
[Mind map is interactive...Click and drag to center map and mouse over gray dots for additional notes.]

Bridging the Writing Gap

Marielle — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:53:55 +0000

In collaboration with the College Board’s National Commission on Writing, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has just published Writing, Technology and Teens, a research report on perceptions of teens and their parents about the relationship between their frequent informal writing through digital communication media and formal writing considered to be important for success in school and work. In short, they found that, “Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing.” Perhaps if they were using electronic communication media in the classroom, as well as outside of school, they would feel differently.

Most teens felt that they could benefit from improved instruction in writing. When teens were asked about their suggestions for improvement, researchers discovered that, “Overall, 82% of teens feel that additional in-class writing time would improve their writing abilities and 78% feel the same way about their teachers using computer-based writing tools.”

Focus group teens offered this helpful advice to educators:
“…they are motivated to write when they can select topics that are relevant to their lives and interests, and report greater enjoyment of school writing when they have the opportunity to write creatively. Having teachers or other adults who challenge them, present them with interesting curricula and give them detailed feedback also serves as a motivator for teens. Teens also report writing for an audience motivates them to write and write well.”

Asking students to share their views about their own learning can be so illuminating. Students, in their infinite wisdom, have identified what makes Web 2.0 communication media so powerful: they genuinely put the act of communication back into writing. They offer a platform for students to use writing to develop their ideas and communicate those ideas to real audiences with real purpose. Isn’t that what we’re trying to prepare them to do? If we want students to learn to communicate in writing, then we should give them opportunities to do so authentically in the course of instruction.

Artificial writing exercises that ask students to tell teachers and test-makers what they already know, or prove command of rhetoric divorced of meaningful substance, do not qualify as authentic communication. Students are eager to use blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions for academic writing because they offer opportunities to interact in writing with other people around ideas. As teachers, we must find ways to engage students in writing about things that matter to them and to society and facilitate the sorts of interactions that help them sharpen the expression of their thoughts. And we are fortunate to now have such helpful tools available to help us meet those goals.