Policy Matters Now and in the Future: Net Neutrality, Corporate Data Mining, and Government Surveillance

In this article, I will detail three key policy issues that have a profound effect on the future of the World Wide Web and Internet-based communications: net neutrality, corporate data mining, and government surveillance. Focusing on policy issues in the U.S., I will describe not only current practices and cases, but future possibilities for writers and teachers of writing. I will draw from work in composition, interdisciplinary studies on privacy, information sharing, and surveillance on the Internet, analyses of applicable policies and laws, and the advocacy efforts by organizations. Issues I will examine include the importance of and threats to net neutrality; how data mining and (so-called) privacy agreements currently work, specifically at social networking sites often used in writing classrooms; and how government and institutional surveillance is far more prevalent than many realize. I will close with recommendations for what writing instructors (and students) can do to try to craft a different future, one where writers and the visual, verbal, aural writing they read and produce online will not be collected, scrutinized, and controlled (or, realistically, at least not as much).     

The effects of participation,performance, and interest in a game‐based writing environment

We have observed that many computer‐supported writing environments based on pedagogical strategies have only been designed to incorporate the cognitive aspects, but motivational aspects should also be included. Hence, we theorize that integrating game‐based learning into the writing environment may be a practical approach that can facilitate student participation, not only helping students learn how to write, but also sustaining their willingness to write. In this study, we investigate the effects of the game‐based writing environment on improving students' participation, performance, and interest in writing. An experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of 2 approaches to writing in language arts at an elementary school. Two hundred forty‐five third grade students participated in the experiment over a period of 1 year. One hundred thirty‐nine students were assigned to an experimental group and learned with a game‐based writing environment, and 106 students were in the contrast group and learned with an online writing environment. The empirical results show that the game‐based writing environment can effectively promote students' writing participation, writing performance, interest in writing, as well as their perceptions of the use of educational self‐management games. Some implications of the experimental results are also discussed.     

Developing sound tutor training for online writing centers: creating productive peer reviewers

It is our experience that tutors trained for face-to-face writing centers are not adequately prepared for the challenges they encounter working with online writing centers. The purpose of our article is to provide an overview—especially for administrators, developers, and tutors new to electronic tutoring environments—of the issues and considerations unique to online tutoring that training programs need to address. In our discussion, we hope to engender enthusiasm for online tutoring by discussing three aspects of online tutoring: appreciating text-only environments, developing procedures for responding online, and creating appropriate roles for online tutors. We offer suggestions about how to address these three aspects in online tutor training, and we suggest that addressing these issues leads to an understanding of the online tutor as a productive peer reviewer.     

“I think you just got mixed up”: confident peer tutors hedge to support partners’ face needs

During collaborative learning, computer-supported or otherwise, students balance task-oriented goals with the interpersonal goals of relationship-building. This means that in peer tutoring, some pedagogically beneficial behaviors may be avoided by peer tutors due to their likelihood to get in the way of relationship-building. In this paper, we explore how the interpersonal closeness between students in a peer tutoring dyad and the peer tutors’ instructional self-efficacy impacts those tutors’ delivery style of various tutoring moves, and explore the impact those tutoring move delivery styles have on their partners’ learning. We found that tutors with lower social closeness with their tutees provide more positive feedback to their tutee and use more indirect instructions and comprehension-monitoring, but this is only the case for tutors with greater tutoring self-efficacy. And in fact, those tutees solved more problems and learned more when their tutors hedged instructions and comprehension-monitoring, respectively. We found no effect of hedging for dyads with greater social closeness, on the other hand, suggesting that interpersonal closeness may reduce the face-threat of direct instructions and comprehension-monitoring, and hence reduce the need for indirectness, while tutors’ instructional self-efficacy allows tutors to use those moves without feeling threatened themselves. These results emphasize that designers of CSCL systems should understand the nature of how the interpersonal closeness between collaborating students intersects with those students’ self-efficacy to impact the use and delivery of their learning behaviors, in order to best support them in collaborating effectively.     

What we have here is a failure to communicate: the criticality of writing in online instruction

This article addresses how online instructors can improve their email communications with students. The characteristics and demands of online instruction are described and characterized as depending on the instructor’s ability to communicate in writing. A model to guide instructors in their online communications, the Golden Triangles of Online Communication, is presented. The first triangle underscores the criticality of considering (a) the online learning environment context, (b) the learner, and (c) the learning task. The second triangle presents three critical questions that instructors using online communications must quickly answer (a) What is this about? (b) Why should I care? and (c) What am I supposed to do? The Golden Triangles represent an effort to provide assistance to instructors in the difficult task of providing high quality instruction with high student satisfaction in online learning. In the final analysis, we underscore the importance of instructors’ writing skills in effective and appealing online in teaching.     

Teaching interlocutor relationships in electronic classrooms

This article presents a pedagogy for teaching writing students a theory of interlocutor relationships in synchronous computer conferencing (SCC), also known as chat. The interlocutor relationship theory is a tool for analyzing online discourse as part of a pedagogy designed to make students more sensitive to audience issues in chat. I have constructed four major categories of interlocutor relationships along a continuum of degrees of conflict: agonistic, hierarchical, dialectical, and empathic relationships. I argue that the application of this rhetorical theory provides students and instructors with a heuristic for collaboratively analyzing and constructing interlocutor relationships throughout the composing process. The purpose of this project is to provide instructors and students with strategies for dealing with the close connections among rhetoric and ethics in chat.     

Reel-to-Reel Tapes,Cassettes, and Digital Audio Media: Reverberations from a Half-Century of Recorded-Audio Response to Student Writing

This article applies Everett M. Rogers’ diffusion of innovations model to analyze how instructors have adopted the method of recording audio responses to students’ writing. The analysis focuses on five attributes of recorded-audio response—its observability, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and relative advantage—that, in Rogers’ model, influence the pace at which an innovation is adopted. I examine these attributes by drawing on a half-century of literature discussing recorded-audio response. The analysis reveals that recorded-audio response has elicited a mixed set of perceptions of the innovation's five attributes even among those who have adopted it, many perceptions that would tend to boost its adoption rate, but some that would tend to suppress it. Such an analysis provides both a systematic perspective on why audio-recording has remained a marginal method for responding to students’ writing, and also a heuristic by which writing instructors can consider adopting this and other pedagogical and technological innovations.     

More than Just Remixing: Uptake and New Media Composition

This article turns to genre theory's recent explorations of uptake, broadly defined as the ways genres interact, as a resource for sketching a pedagogy of shuttling between genres. Using uptake, I intend to reconceptualize multimodal compositions as a means of participating in rhetorical ecologies that consist of transactions between genres instead of thinking of remixes as an end in themselves. In this article, I first define the concept of uptake in detail and discuss its use in rhetorical genre studies. After further illustrating uptake through an analysis of transactions between YouTube parodies and the 2005 German language film Downfall, I discuss existing scholarship in multimodal composition that draws on genre but not the idea of uptake in order to lay a foundation for a pedagogy that highlights the links, feedbacks, and rules that coordinate genres. My aim in the last section is to sketch possibilities for how teachers and students can deploy the concept of uptake as a rhetorical tool to strengthen their awareness of genre and multimodality. In doing this, I hope to reposition multimodal projects as beginnings or midpoints that lead to students’ emersion into public discourse rather than culminations or end goals in themselves. Integrating studies of uptake into writing curricula in this way will help students to make sophisticated rhetorical decisions in the age of media convergence.     

The impact of e-feedback on the revisions of L2 writers in an academic writing course

This study explored the relationship between electronic feedback (e-feedback) and its impact on second-language (L2) writers’ revisions specifically focusing on how L2 students responded to their peers and what kinds of revisions they made as a result of the feedback they received. The 20 L2 writers wrote, responded, and revised on a database-driven web site specifically designed for writing and responding. Other forms of feedback they received included oral feedback from friends and peers and from face-to-face meetings with university writing center tutors. Results suggest students preferred oral feedback. However, e-feedback had a greater impact on revision than oral feedback, implying that e-feedback might be more useful. Additionally, e-feedback helped L2 writers focus on larger writing blocks. Thus, L2 writers may use e-feedback to create macro revisions. This exploratory study highlights a new form of revising and responding and offers insights into joining oral response to online collaboration.     

Influence of group configuration on online discourse writing

This study examines the impact of different strategies for grouping students in online, discourse-intensive distance education courses. The mixed methods research focused on note writing productivity (based on 366 participants in 25 classes) and participants' perceptions (12 graduate students and 10 instructors) relating to three different class configurations (large whole class, small whole class, large class divided into subgroups). Each configuration exhibited advantages and disadvantages in terms of supporting note writing, however, the data analyses suggested that the advantages for writing in subgroups outweighed those of the other two conditions. Splitting larger classes into smaller subgroups appears to reduce information overload and encourages more focused, in-depth discussions. The research concludes with a list of pedagogical recommendations and suggests new software features that may help learning within specific group configurations. This study may have implications for both practitioners and researchers who wish to promote more fruitful online discussions.     

“It wasn’t me,was it?” Plagiarism and the Web

Issues of plagiarism are complex, and made all the more complicated by students’ increasing use of the World Wide Web as a research space. In this article, we describe several situations we faced as teachers in writing-intensive classrooms—experiences common to most teachers of writing. We share these examples to explore how issues related to plagiarism and its effects are both reproduced and change in new research spaces. We also share these stories to discuss how we can best handle plagiarism in first-year writing classrooms and how we can best equip students with the tools necessary to do appropriate research—both online and offline.     

5G时代下对微课发展现状及趋势的思考

5G时代的来临标志着时延低、可靠性高的网络真正的走进了千家万户。如果说4G时代推动了智能手机的大规模发展,那么5G时代的到来将会有效地推动智能社会的快速发展,将组成社会的各个部门有机地联系在一起,形成一个庞大的网络结构。5G时代的到来使得社会的方方面面发生了巨大的变化,当然教育领域也不例外,教育本身就是一项与时代紧密结合的活动,因此,5G时代的到来为学生们的学习提供了更多的便利,使得学生们能够通过网上微课获取更多的知识,更好的帮助学生们进行学习。所以,本文将会对5G时代下微课的发展现状以及发展趋势进行分析,以便于为在5G时代下如何发挥好微课作用的研究提供一定的参考。     

Re-embodying Online Composition: Ecologies of Writing in Unreal Time and Space

Using the ecological theories of writing proposed by Marilyn Cooper's “The Ecology of Writing” (1986) and Margaret Syverson's The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition (1999), this article describes a multi-step assignment sequence designed to engage online first year composition students across the ecological breadth of their writing and learning environments. The goal of the project is twofold: enriching students’ writing processes with a sophisticated understanding of the social situatedness of knowledge and rhetoric, we can simultaneously create high-functioning learning communities in an otherwise disembodied online learning space, not by upgrading our technological tools but by pedagogically guiding learners toward ecological and productively collaborative interactions with one another.     

Tutoring executives online: what drives perceived quality?

Studies of learning and student satisfaction in the context of online university programmes have largely neglected programmes catering specifically to business executives. Such executives have typically been away from higher education for a number of years, and have collected substantial practical experience in the subject matters they are taught. Their expectations in terms of both content and delivery may therefore be different from non-executive students. We explore perceptions of the quality of tutoring in the context of an online executive MBA programme through participant interviews. We find that in addition to some of the tutor behaviours already discussed in the literature, executive students look specifically for practical industry knowledge and experience in tutors, when judging how effective a tutor is. This has implications for both the recruitment and training of online executive MBA tutors.     

Formative computer-based feedback in the university classroom: Specific concept maps scaffold students' writing

Formative feedback can be regarded as a crucial scaffold for students' writing cohesive texts. However, especially in large lectures students rarely receive feedback on their writing product. Thus, computer-based feedback could be an alternative to provide formative feedback to students. However, it is less clear, how computer-based feedback should be designed to help students writing cohesive texts. For that purpose, we implemented three different computer-based feedback methods within an authentic large lecture class. We investigated effects of the format (outline versus concept map) and the specificity (specific versus general) of the feedback on students' perceived difficulty and the generation of cohesive texts. We found that specific concept map feedback was perceived as less difficult as compared to the general feedback or the specific outline feedback. Additionally, students who received specific feedback wrote explanatory texts that were more cohesive as compared to students with the general feedback. However, the format of the feedback (concept map versus outline) did not account for improvements of cohesion. Evidently, specific concept map feedback can be regarded as an efficient scaffold to provide cohesive explanations.     

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.     

Learning to write in an online writing center: The effect of learning styles on the writing process

One of the main advantages of online learning materials is that they can be adapted for students with different learning styles. This article presents a study and a methodology to investigate whether students with different learning styles make use of the potential flexibility of online learning materials, i.c. in the context of an online writing center. The study aims to investigate the effect of learning styles on (a) the students' approach to the writing task (process), and (b) on the letters they write (product). Twenty students each completed a module on writing ‘bad news’ letters designed for Business Communication courses. Their reading and writing processes were recorded. The letters were also graded to determine their quality. An effect of learning style was found: Active and Reflective writers approached the task differently, but only in the beginning of the process. In this early stage Reflective learners were more likely to focus on the theory section than Active learners. This suggests that writers with different learning styles tackle the learning materials in different ways, often in line with the preferences that characterize their learning styles. However, no effect of learning style on text quality was found.     

Collaborating with writing tools: An instrumental perspective on the problem of computer-supported collaborative activities

This paper presents an analysis of the modifications that a synchronous computer support for collaborative writing introduces into the organization of co-authors' writing. The analysis is grounded in case studies of different groups of co-authors writing a report together face to face and at a distance through a collaborative writing computer system. Drawing from these studies I suggest that the problems with using a collaborative writing computer system to provide a fully collaborative writing environment derive from underlying assumptions concerning collaboration within the co-authoring activity. I point out that a more thorough understanding of how co-authors organize their writing can provide resources to envisage more radical solutions to the problem of computer support for collaboration. I conclude by considering ways that might be adequate to reconfigure collaborative writing systems in order to provide more satisfactory support for collaboration in writing environments.     

Insights from an expressive writing intervention on Facebook to help alleviate depressive symptoms

Depression is one of the most common mental disorders. Studies have shown that various online social network (OSN) activities can be used as a marker for people's moods as well as symptoms of subsyndromal depression, suggesting possibilities for online-based interventions. This study investigates one such potential by developing an expressive writing application within Facebook and by investigating how the designed intervention as well as various online social network activities contribute to improving one's emotional state. Experimental data show that negative emotional words and cognitive words in online expressive writing are the two most important factors in alleviating depressive symptoms. Furthermore, participants who have had previous experience expressing emotions in OSNs reported the greatest reduction in depressive symptoms. Our findings have implications that can assist in designing personalized online intervention platforms and for sophisticated writing therapy to maximize the effect of expressive writing.