Archive for the ‘collaboration’ 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 IV)
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).
Putting It All Together: Collaborative and Integrated Reading and Writing
Introduction
Scholastic writing used to be disconnected. From research: reading and writing took place in different spaces at different times. From other writers: writing was a solitary activity. From previous steps of the process: each piece of writing produced along the way was discarded. From a real audience: students wrote to prove something to a professor who claimed they were engaged in an imaginary “academic discourse.” From authentic purpose: writing ended up in the garbage can and all the student’s hard work, knowledge, insights and craftsmanship were wasted.
“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admits that any article on technology is like “writing a placard for a museum exhibit” (1) because such an article is out of date the moment it is published.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.
