Elements and implications of a hypertext pedagogy

This paper describes elements of a pedagogy for writing hypertext stories in year eight classes in secondary schools. Over a period of 18 months, 100 students in three schools completed handwritten and hypertext stories. The pedagogical elements identified include the use of pictures in hypertexts, collaboration, screen-based writing, non-linear writing and student oral presentations of hypertext stories with an LCD projector. Some future trends in students' hypertext writing research are identified. The paper argues that the teaching practices described challenge accepted notions of teaching.     

Designing efficiencies: The parallel narratives of distance education and composition studies

Distance education (DE) programs at many universities have been initiated to generate new efficiencies for the academic process, particularly cost efficiency and pedagogical efficiency. In writing studies, this move toward digitally mediated instruction has, in some classrooms, recreated practices that resonate with the pedagogy that resulted from Current-Traditional Rhetoric (CTR). Thus, a trace of distance education's and composition studies’ parallel narratives demonstrates that writing studies has already addressed some of the questions (and concerns) that online writing instruction raises. By specifically focusing on the tensions created by negotiating cost efficiencies and pedagogical efficiencies with communication efficiencies and medium efficiencies, we interrogate current administrative decisions as well their pedagogical outcomes. We conclude by proposing strategies for rearticulating future narratives about online writing instruction in potentially productive ways.     

A Pedagogy of Resistance Toward Plagiarism Detection Technologies

This article interrogates the use of plagiarism detection devices from a critical and rhetorical standpoint, using both plagiarism detection technologies as well as essay mills as sites for analysis and subversion. My goal is to argue for a pedagogy of resistance to plagiarism detection technologies. Both plagiarism detection sites and online paper mills play into the very issue we as rhetoricians and compositionists should be resisting; that is, by upholding the singular notion of authorship as something individualistic, commercialized, and commodified, these sites reinforce individual authorship to the detriment of more communal forms of writing that are prized in online environments such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and so on. If we are forced into the circular logic of avoiding plagiarism/catching plagiarists/punishing plagiarism and prizing singular authorship above all other forms, then we risk failing to find the ability to break free and move beyond to more challenging modes of writing that rely on community. The potential time-saving benefits of plagiarism detection services—that is, the ease of discovering potential plagiarism—may unfortunately lull us into compliance and cause us to forget that there are larger issues regarding copyright law and ownership of ideas still up for debate.     

The future of rational-critical debate in online public spheres

This paper discusses the role of blogs, wikis, and online discussion boards in enabling rational-critical debate. I will use the work of Jürgen Habermas to explain why wikis, blogs, and online bulletin boards are all potentially valuable tools for the creation and maintenance of a critical public sphere. Habermas’ story ends on a sad note; the public writing environments he argues were so essential to the formation of a critical public sphere failed as commercialism and mass media diminished the role of the community and private persons. Unfortunately, the Internet will likely suffer a similar fate if we do not take action to preserve its inherently democratic and decentralized architecture. Here, I describe the integral role that blogs, wikis, and discussion boards play in fostering public discussion and ways they can be incorporated into college composition courses.     

Embodying the Writer in the Multimodal Classroom through Disability Studies

This essay explores whether multimodal composition can compel the academy to revise its vision of writing as an exclusively intellectual practice, a vision that limits the authority students can claim in their academic writing. I argue that without theorizing the embodiment of composition, multimodal composition will ultimately do little to alter the ideal of the academic writer engaged in intellectual rather than material production. The essay advocates the pedagogical possibilities of disability theory as one approach to emphasizing the physical nature of writing and meaning-making in the multimodal composition classroom.     

When human subjects become cybersubjects: A call for collaborative consent

This essay treats the proliferation of online collaboration as a rationale for rethinking human subjects ethics in composition. Specifically, I argue that the Conference on College Composition and Communication's research guidelines for the ethical treatment of students and student writing are grounded in an individualist ethos that is an inadequate frame for researching contemporary writing pedagogy. As a result, teacher-researchers who seek students’ informed consent for participation in a research study may inadvertently encourage students to view their writing as individual property, a vision of authorship not representative of the field's discursive values. As a corrective, I propose that composition scholars develop a guideline for soliciting students’ collaborative consent. In addition to addressing a practical concern regarding the study of collaborative production in virtual and print contexts, collaborative consent has the potential to do important ideological work by sanctioning collaboration and validating students’ extracurricular digital literacies.     

Weathering wikis: Net-based learning meets political science in a South African university

Wikis represent flexible tools functioning as open-ended environments for collaboration while also offering process and group writing support. Here we focus on a project to innovate the use of wikis for collaborative writing within student groups in a final-year undergraduate political science course. The primary questions guiding our research were in what ways could wikis assist collaborative learning in an undergraduate course in political science and how we could support educators’ in the effective use of wikis? Curiously, wikis may serve as a mediating artifact for collaborative writing even among students who are reluctant to post online drafts. The paper raises questions concerning the nature and limits of lecturer and tutor power to deliver transformative educational innovations in relation to the capacity of students to embrace, comply with, or resist such innovation. In analysing the negotiation of the use of wikis in the course by and among the lecturer, tutors, and students, we draw on two principles in activity theory, which Yrjö Engeström argued are central to his model of expansive learning: multi-voicedness and contradictions [Engeström, Yrjö. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit; Engeström, Yrjö. (2001). Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work14(1), 133-156.]. We add a third principle, transparency, to more fully capture what we observed.     

Negotiating What's at Stake in Informal Writing in the Writing Center

How do students learn expectations for “informal” online composition? This article details the results of a qualitative study that examines how students and writing consultants negotiate and define writing conventions for “low-stakes,” digital composition: that is, writing assignments that are composed for Blackboard discussion forums and receive only completion grades. Study results are based on both a survey of student experiences with digital composition and a writing center consultation case study at a large, southeastern, RU/VH university. Student anxiety about digital composition and classroom instruction have contributed to writing centers’ status as space for students to work out their fears and questions about new media. This study reports on how digital composition in writing classes has impacted the ways in which writing centers must address issues of audience, consider new methods for invention, and contend with a renewed focus on grammatical correctness. The article presents suggested pedagogy for emerging digital composition and poses questions to those in computers and composition about how we might best approach classroom instruction as digital composition genres evolve.     

Identifying an appropriate pedagogy for virtual worlds: A Communal Constructivism case study

As increasing numbers of educators explore the use of virtual worlds for education, there is a need to consider which pedagogical approaches can provide an opportunity to do more than recreate the traditional classroom by leveraging the unique characteristics and potential that the technology can offer. This study identifies Communal Constructivism as a potentially appropriate pedagogy for use in the virtual world Second Life. Five groups of learners took part in a learning experience specifically designed to provide opportunity for the features of Communal Constructivism to emerge through the affordances of the technology. The chat logs, learning artefacts, post-activity semi-structured interviews and researcher’s observations from each of the five groups were analysed to explore participants’ experiences and both the operation and outcome of the pedagogy in action. Findings from the qualitative analysis of the data sets indicate that learners collaboratively constructed knowledge for themselves as a group and for others, as the features of the pedagogy emerged.     

Strange Bedfellows: Human-Computer Interaction, Interface Design, and Composition Pedagogy

As digital interfaces increasingly mediate our access to information, the design of these interfaces becomes increasingly important. Designing digital interfaces requires writers to make rhetorical choices that are sometimes technical in nature and often correspond with principles taught in the computer science subfield of human-computer interaction. We propose that an HCI-informed writing pedagogy can complicate for both writing and computer science students the important role audience should play when designing traditional and digital interfaces. Although it is a subtle shift in many ways, this pedagogy seemed to complicate student understanding of the relationship between audience and the texts/interfaces they created: it was not just the “human” (beliefs, attitudes, values, demographics) or the “computer” (the software or hardware or other types of mediation) that mattered but rather the “interaction” between the two. First we explore some of the ways in which writing code and writing prose have merged and paved the way for an HCI-informed writing pedagogy. Next we examine some parallels between human-computer interaction principles and composition principles. Finally, we refer to assignments, student responses, and anecdotal evidence from our classes where an HCI-informed writing pedagogy drew—or could have drawn—student attention more acutely to various audience-related technical and rhetorical interface design choices.     

Reading between the code: the teaching of HTML and the displacement of writing instruction

The introduction of hypertext markup language (HTML) into the composition classroom often complicates traditional text-bound assignments. The process of incorporating HTML codes into writing can be frustrating because HTML is difficult to learn. More time spent learning coding skills may mean less time spent learning other writing skills. In many ways, learning HTML is like learning a second language. Unlike other pedagogical tools, though, HTML seems to blur the lines of our discipline. It turns the traditional composition course into a hybrid language/writing/computer course. This reshaping displaces traditional writing activities with technology-based instruction, thus challenging the notion of what constitutes appropriate curricular content within the composition classroom. This curricular change necessitates political action on the part of technology-focused teachers, for instance the establishment of new types of teaching collaboratives and the rethinking of departmental policies.     

Exploring the links between pre-service teachers’ beliefs and video-based reflection in wikis

In teacher education, video has been used frequently for the development of competencies for effective teaching. However, few empirical studies have investigated reciprocal relationships between pre-service teachers’ beliefs and video-based reflection activities. The present study investigated the influences of epistemological beliefs about mathematics on video-based reflection in wikis. Elementary school pre-service teachers had carried out reflective writing and questioning activities after watching a video clip about mathematics learning or instruction in wikis for six weeks. This study also explored the relationships between video-based reflection activities and the change of mathematical beliefs for teaching (MBT). Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected to examine the links between beliefs and reflection activities. This study found that epistemological beliefs partially influenced reflective writing and questioning activities in wikis. In addition, video-based reflection activities were beneficial for the beliefs of mathematical knowledge and students. This study also identified a few reflection and question categories that were closely related to the change of MBT. Lastly, implications of this study were discussed in regard to video-based reflection practices in teacher education.     

Networking,Storytelling and Knowledge Production in First-Year Writing

As writing teachers, we seek to validate the knowledge that students bring to the classroom while introducing and cultivating new methods, strategies, techniques and technologies that may serve them now and in the future. In this article we describe an approach we take that integrates curricular and extracurricular co-apprenticeship strategies using public writing models in conjunction with social networking tools. With publication as a final goal, we urge students to move from expressing personal problems to addressing social issues, using a private, non-commercial learning network NoDiff <http://NoDiff.com> as a safe zone for skills development, knowledge production and social inquiry. In taking this approach, we resist dichotomies that place professional skills training in strict opposition to critical pedagogy. We argue that many of the so-called “extracurricular” composing activities that most of today's students engage in lay the groundwork for both professional and civic participation. Acknowledging that we as composition teachers are also beginners in the world of 21^st century communication, we emphasize both (1) the continual transference of skills and knowledge among teachers and learners; and (2) the importance of providing what is often lacking in skills-based ‘new literacy’ training, namely a critical pedagogical approach to learning as social engagement and critical intervention.     

The appropriation and repurposing of social technologies in higher education

Abstract   This paper presents some of the findings from a recent project that conducted a virtual ethnographic study of three formal courses in higher education that use 'Web 2.0' or social technologies for learning and teaching. It describes the pedagogies adopted within these courses, and goes on to explore some key themes emerging from the research and relating to the pedagogical use of weblogs and wikis in particular. These themes relate primarily to the academy's tendency to constrain and contain the possibly more radical effects of these new spaces. Despite this, the findings present a range of student and tutor perspectives which show that these technologies have significant potential as new collaborative, volatile and challenging environments for formal learning.     

Hypertextual border crossing: students and teachers,texts and contexts

Collaborative hypertext writing in the college classroom can underwrite a pedagogy rooted in the cultural hybridity bell hooks has argued is central to progressive educational methodology. This article offers a narrative of the collaborative creation of a HyperCard hypertext called the E.A.R., and describes how the ideas developed in that project were adapted into a first-year composition course. In exploring the creation of a collaborative hypertext, we hope to gain insight into both the larger aims of the border crossings central to hooks’ ongoing project and the more local goals of hypertext pedagogy.     

Automatic detection of accommodation steps as an indicator of knowledge maturing

Jointly working on shared digital artifacts - such as wikis - is a well-tried method of developing knowledge collectively within a group or organization. Our assumption is that such knowledge maturing is an accommodation process that can be measured by taking the writing process itself into account. This paper describes the development of a tool that detects accommodation automatically with the help of machine learning algorithms. We applied a software framework for task detection to the automatic identification of accommodation processes within a wiki. To set up the learning algorithms and test its performance, we conducted an empirical study, in which participants had to contribute to a wiki and, at the same time, identify their own tasks. Two domain experts evaluated the participants’ micro-tasks with regard to accommodation. We then applied an ontology-based task detection approach that identified accommodation with a rate of 79.12%. The potential use of our tool for measuring knowledge maturing online is discussed.     

Making Peace with the Rising Costs of Writing Technologies: Flexible Classroom Design as a Sustainable Solution

In a challenging economy where budgets for academic programs seem to shrink each year, writing programs face serious economic challenges. When fiscal challenges are paired with the ever-changing nature of writing technologies and the need to update classroom technologies on a regular basis, the challenges can seem insurmountable. In this article the authors discuss the multiple phases of a classroom redesign project where first-year composition students used their own laptop computers in a flexible classroom, which included mobile furnishings, mobile whiteboards, and multiple LCD screens for projection. The purpose of the project was to design a space that was economically sustainable and would better meet the needs of composition instructors and students. To meet that goal, the First-Year Writing Program partnered with the institution's IT and Design Services to develop the flexible classroom model. The flexible classroom project sought to answer the question: how do we take existing classroom spaces and small/shrinking budgets and make the spaces work well for the teaching of writing? Based on financial comparisons of equipment between the flexible classroom versus classrooms where computers are provided by the university, as well as student surveys, the authors found that a flexible design is a cost-effective solution that is also an effective pedagogical space.     

Rethinking Authenticity: Voice and Feedback in Media Discourse

As authentic communicative practices, news writing and media discourse have the potential to serve as pedagogical tools for foreign language students to explore content of interest. This study analyzed university students’ media discourse in the virtual world of Second Life and subsequent revisions of their works in progress with respect to (1) journalistic headlines, (2) journalistic vocabulary, (3) journalistic organization, and (4) journalistic style. The results have revealed connections between voice and composition—that is, exchanging and sharing true thoughts and feelings while maintaining a self-image facilitated more concise, engaging, clear, and relevant news writing from new or different perspectives. Participants’ actions, perceptions, and movements also facilitated a better understanding of communicative practices specific to the virtual world. The results suggest that we should rethink authenticity in terms of content, contexts, purposes, and audiences to design computer-mediated collaborative learning tasks and support students’ authentic engagement of peers or other international speakers in lingua franca communication. This study may shed light on the future use of new media literacy and playful peer discourse in foreign language writing.     

Digital Divide 2.0: “Generation M” and Online Social Networking Sites in the Composition Classroom

The digital divide has been largely theorized as a problem of access. Compositionists have attempted to move beyond a binary view of technology access in examining the digital divide and in doing so have raised important questions about the larger societal issues connected to issues of technological literacy and access. While much attention has been paid to students at risk of growing up without access to, and experience with, computers, attention also needs to be paid to students’ critical digital literacies. Additionally, we now face a new instantiation of the digital divide where students are often more technologically adept than their instructors. The problem is not so much providing access for Generation M students surrounded by technology but rather to effectively integrate technological literacy instruction into the composition classroom in meaningful ways. Compositionists should focus on incorporating into their pedagogy technologies that students are familiar with but do not think critically about: online social networking sites, podcasts, audio mash-ups, blogs, and wikis. To do so, however, instructors first need to familiarize themselves with these technologies. In essence, compositionists must catch up with the Generation M students who have left them behind.