Metablog on Metafiction

Integrated reading and writing

Research and writing used to occur separately in space and time. Students would do their research in the library and then do their writing elsewhere. According to James P. Purdy in “The Changing Space of Research: Web 2.0 and the Integration of Research and Writing Environments,” the physical and temporal separation “disconnects research from writing, artificially separates the academic from the non-academic, and misrepresents how knowledge is created. This compartmentalization incorrectly leads students to believe that research and writing are wholly separate and separable, that they are uniformed by one another” (Purdy 48).

According to Goen-Salter, in the talk mentioned above on integrated reading and writing, students should be able to use what they know about reading to inform their writing and what they know about writing to inform their reading. For example, analysis of a text’s structure could help students develop more complex forms than the five-paragraph essay and studies of structure in writing could help them navigate their way through more complicated readings. The internet offers a plethora of opportunities to combine reading and writing in ways unknown before. Lisa Zawilinski writes, “As online readers gather information to solve a problem, they frequently analyze information, critically evaluate, synthesize across multiple texts and communicate with others using instant messaging, emails, blogs, wikis or other communication vehicles” (Zawilinski 652). In other words, the internet is already creating environments that mix research and writing in important new ways.

As the amount of information continues to explode, it is more urgent than ever, then, to give students the critical skills they will need to shift through and evaluate the vast amounts of material available. Researchers can no longer rely on the information they find in books in the library, selected by staff or professors. “An important lesson for students (and all researchers) can be found in acknowledging the potential for misinformation in research and the resultant need to critically analyze rather than passively accept published findings” (Purdy 51). In spite of loud complaints from academia about the loss of control on such sites as Wikipedia, this is certainly a positive change. Reading now requires independent critical thinking all the time, and not a reliance on selection from authorities.

The first step is to encourage students to personalize research spaces with RSS feeds, bookmarks and even their own tagging system on academic sites like JSTOR. By creating their own research environments, student-writers are in effect writing their own library, changing how they view and interact with material. These self-designed research spaces challenge the authority of an academic monopoly on knowledge because they are no longer limited geographically to a single spot, but can be accessed wherever researchers can get the internet. “Research becomes less about being in a particular place (e.g., an archive or library)” Purdy says, “and more about engaging in a particular activity” (Purdy 54).

Nor are these self-created research spaces limited to a particular assignment but can carry on after a paper is finished and students graduate: “The ideal result is that students see their research efforts as less tied to only one specific assignment (a class requirement they can forget all about after the semester) and more connected to ongoing knowledge-generating activity (an intellectual practice they can apply to other contexts)” (Purdy 53).

As research and writing become more interconnected, Purdy argues, students realize they are not just consumers of knowledge, but active producers, evaluating, summarizing, criticizing, expanding, and integrating what they read while they read it. “Even if students do not pursue academic careers, as most will not,” Purdy writes, “their sense that academic research matters for and impacts their lives is a potentially valuable outcome of connecting, rather than separating, their Web 2.0 experiences and scholarly work.”

When reading and writing happen together, the emphasis shifts from the consumption of knowledge to the production of knowledge. The writing that students produce then becomes a real part of the knowledge pool, instead of disappearing in the teacher’s wastebasket or in a box in the students’ garage, and students see a real and immediate, lasting significance to their work. Richardson tells us that, as composition instructors, it is our duty to “prepare our students to become not only readers and writers, but editors and collaborators and publishers as well” (Richardson 5).

The web is making knowledge more open and accessible and therefore more democratic. Tim Berners-Lee, developer of the World Wide Web in 1989, said, “The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we all meet and read and write” (quoted in Richardson 1) and Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s data and make it universally accessible and useful.” Before academics relied on a scarcity of knowledge, a hoarding of information in the ivory tower, to give economic value to their activities. Lankshear writes that “Conventional social relations associated with the roles of author/authority and expert have broken down radically under the move from ‘publishing’ to participation, from centralized authority to mass collaboration” (Lankshear 14).

There are important qualifications to this democratizing tendency of the web, however. Although “affinity groups” can be liberate someone from traditional identities, these groups are still frequently separated by class, racial and gender lines. Students need to be given the skills to recognize their own “ideological situatedness,” as Lothlorien put it at the beginning of this paper, to recognize what invisible factors are determining how they write and read, so that they have more flexibility to become socially conscious citizens of a global community.