Once I Metablog on Metafiction

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.

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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.
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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).

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Bridging Everyday and Academic Writing

How can a teacher connect out-of-class and in-class writings? First of all, teachers should make students aware of the skills most of them already have: familiarity with different modes of writing, descriptive, narrative, and persuasive skills, awareness of audience and purpose, and ability to write in different tones. I propose an activity in which students find examples from their own writing, the writing of friends, or the writing of peers who are strangers online or off for as many different modes of writing they can discover, including, but not limited to, text messages, online chatting, posts on social network sites, emails, and blogs. This exercise should also include paper-based media such as postcards, letters, comics, zines and fanfiction. If the assignment is open-ended, many unexpected forms of text should also appear.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Before Web 2.0, research and writing were separate, spatially and conceptually. Research took place in the library and then writing happened elsewhere. Even if writing took place in at study tables or a computer room within the library, these spaces were still separate from research spaces, as were the activities: research came first, then the writing second. With Web 2.0, James P. Purdy argues, students are creating their own research spaces by bookmarking pages, subscribing to RSS feeds, and personalizing sites such as JSTOR, and these research spaces are not fixed geographically, but are available wherever the internet is accessible, nor are they limited to a particular project, but will continue to be available after a paper is finished and students graduate; therefore, these self-created research spaces challenge the authority of an academic monopoly on knowledge. People today are using the internet as the primary source of research and so it would be blind to continue to insist on library-based research (sources selected by professors and staff), rather than helping students to develop the critical skills they will undoubtedly need to evaluate sources of information in the digital age. Most importantly research and writing have become interconnected tasks, helping students to realize they are not just consumers of knowledge, but active producers, evaluating, summarizing, criticizing, expanding, and integrating what they read while they read it. The writing students produce then becomes a real part of the knowledge pool, instead of disappearing in the teacher’s wastebasket after grading or in a box in the students’ garage, so students can see a real and immediate, lasting significance to their work.

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Basically, my philosophy is that purpose must be made explicit, authentic writing should be integrated, process-oriented and collaborative, and both writing and teaching can delight, as well as instruct. Above all else, students must know why writing is important.

Unless students understand what effective writing can do for them in their real lives, writing assignments will remain little more than busy work, artificial assignments to prove that they have read and understood a text or mastered a particular form, and compositions courses will be just another hurdle to be surmounted on their way to graduation, instead of one of the most important classes in their careers. Student writers must experience firsthand how clear, exact, detailed, persuasive writing can give them power, yes power, in their academic, professional and even personal lives. Read the rest of this entry »