Metablog on Metafiction

Using New Media in the Classroom

The danger of trying to connect everyday and academic writing is setting up a kind of creepy treehouse effect, an artificial environment that supposedly recreates the familiar, more entertaining worlds that students move through, when in fact an overwhelming, but hidden presence of a teacher hovers over all interactions, turning child-like spontaneity into poorly disguised adult intentionality.

Ruth Osorio explained in a post to the class blog “Intention, Intention, Intention,” “By trying to lure students into the world of composition through deceptive means and hiding the teachable moments, we could invade the students’ social environment and dismiss their intelligence” (Osorio). Ruth is suggesting that not making the underlying rationale for an assignment explicit indicates to students that a teacher thinks they are too stupid to understand why a particular activity is taking place. Not doing so also misses out on the opportunity of a “teachable moment,” a chance to examine why we write and why we write differently in different environments. Making it explicit that teachers are not trying to recreate out-of-class writing activities, but to reinvent them for new purposes should prevent most creepy treehouse effects. The important thing here is honesty, or as Ruth so effectively put it, “Intention, Intention, Intention.”

When using new media it is important to acknowledge that although some of the tools are the same, the context and the expectations are completely different. Since expectations are different, a teacher should make those expectations clear. From my own personal experience, I have often been unsure about how formal the class forums should be. Are these informal message boards for students to chat freely about the reading and classwork or are these places where students should post well-shaped, balanced formal writing? Often the expectation is somewhere in between these two extremes, but students must experiment tentatively until a particular tone and register is set by the whole class. Teachers can prevent a lot of anxiety by clarifying. Even better if they require students to read the kinds of writings the teacher hopes they will strive towards, introducing award-winning blogs, for example. Too often, we ask students to produce writing without giving them sufficient examples of what is expected or what is possible.

Scott Warnock suggests in Teaching Writing Online: How & Why that teachers should not overdo it with new media; they should not overwhelm themselves or their students. The ECAR Study of Undergraduates and Information Technology (Salaway, Caruso & Nelson, 2007) found that new media must be fully integrated into the class or students find it a waste of time: “This research found that students are discriminating and recognize ‘[t]echnology is an enabler of learning when professors use it effectively’ (p. 13) while ‘[p]oor use of technology ([that is] under use, over use, inappropriate use, or over dependence [...]) detracts from the learning experience’ (p. 14)” (Middlebrook, conclusion).

As previously stated above, teachers should help students move from private writing to public spaces. This can happen with different types of writing assignments. Some paper-based free-writing can be wholly private, not shared with anyone. For the next step into a more public realm, I suggest a class message board that is only very loosely monitored by the teacher to give students a chance to produce text without worry about grammar, punctuation or depth. They could ask for clarification on assignments, express frustration, discuss topics only tangentially connected to the class, and build social ties. The class forum could be a place where students post more thoughtful question with quotes from the text. Other students would then be required to respond to at least two questions with thoughtful, clear and detailed writing, but without much emphasis on style or structure.

A class blog could be used to produce yet another level of polished writing and to open the students’ work up to a wider audience. In contexts such as these, Middlebrook insists students adhere “to course objectives that students write clear, grammatical, well-structured prose; discover and convey complex ideas critically; appreciate the nuances of good argument; identify and speak to specific audiences in a voice of authority and persuasiveness; and address the academic, public, and professional aspects of writing within disciplines and career fields” (Middlebrook). Finally, formal papers could actually be published in a little booklet, a required purchase of all students, so they have some tangible record of their hard work, bringing classwork back to print-based medium, which is not replaced by digital media, but augmented by it.

In “HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking,” Lisa Zawlinski suggests that blogs may be used to promote higher order thinking skills: analysis, synthesis and evaluation. She identifies four types of classroom blogs: Classroom News Blog (syllabus, homework assignments, updates), Mirror Blogs (quotes, impressions, reflections, new ideas), Literature Response Blogs (question and response, summary, synthesis), and Showcase Blogs (student works in various media published). The first three, however, might work better on a less-public class forum than on a public blog.

Zawlinski writes that integrating the blog into classwork should include these steps: Bolstering the Background (finding out what students already know, research projects on author and time period, lists of resources), Priming the Pump (first impressions, summaries, confusions clarifies, connections to themselves, other texts or the world), Continuing the Conversation (summarizing and synthesizing across multiple textual units and classroom discussion), and Making Multiplicity Explicit (requiring students to address others’ comments and respond with evidence and clear explanations) (Zawilinski 652 – 655).