Archive for the ‘chris gerben’ tag
Putting It All Together (Part VI)
Process-Oriented, Collaborative and Shared
With new media, what matters most is the process, not the product. Unlike previous kinds of free-writing and generative assignments, discarded once the final product is turned in, new media gives each step of the writing process its own validity and its own separate existence. Text on a message board is not preserved, but serves its own purpose and exists in its own right, as do questions and responses to the class forums. Writers may use material, ideas, and insights later for more formal blog posts.
Putting It All Together (Part II)
Acknowledging Out-of-Class Literacies Creates Continuity
Taken as a group, young people today are reading more than ever before: surfing the internet, playing text-based video games, reading blogs, zines and fan fiction. They are writing more than ever before: designing webpages, sending text-messages and emails, and writing for social-networking sites, discussion boards, and blogs. Yet some teachers complain about a decline in literacy, a new informality to writing, a slip in spelling and grammar, a lack of organization, an inability to focus deeply on one topic for extended periods.
“Putting 2.0 and Two Together”: An Article by Chris Gerben
Gerben admits that any article on technology is like “writing a placard for a museum exhibit” (1) because such an article is out of date the moment it is published. What matters, however, is the collaborative process itself, an ongoing, ever-changing, ever developing conversation, “a museum-in-progress” (1). Collaboration was stressed in education in the past, but the opportunity, he says, was largely wasted. New technologies require writers to actively consider a real and immediate audience, who in turn co-author the text. He discusses a concept known as “versioning, which takes into consideration that as new voices join a conversation, the direction and outcome of the conversation itself changes” (15). In other words, the conversations of process become the final text. While the article helped me grasp the changes in concepts of authorship and collaboration, the article was so concerned with staying relevant that instead of offering specific advice that teachers of writing can immediately use in the classroom, he discusses only general, abstract concepts.
