Analysis: Mcsweeney's article, while hilarious and satirical, does raise an interesting point raised in one of the articles I read. Should we consider digital platforms a legitimate writing form, and teach how to write for it? Or at the very least, use it as a teaching tool? I think it might be useful for composition courses.
Both of the articles I decided to read come from Computers and Composition. According to the blurb on the website, under the section for Theory Under Practice. “Composition as a discipline is constantly evolving, changing its teaching practices in keeping with innovations in theory and technology. Therefore, Theory into Practice strives to illuminate these evolving connections between theories, computer technologies, and pedagogical practices.” While this is just a section of the journal, from what I see of the articles it seems this focus is firmly placed on how writing and teaching writing is affected by the advent of new technologies.
My first article, “Putting 2.0 and Two Together: What Web 2.0 Can Teach Composition About Collaborative Learning, has a fairly self-explanatory title. The article concerns itself with how websites, specifically digital platforms and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and such can be used to teach collaborative learning by way of offering a place to put out writings to be looked at by many sets of eyes while simultaneously allowing many people to have a voice and comments on that writing.
“Overlooking this sharp divide, I ask compositionists to look closer at the where of textual production and collaborative community formation; as student-users turn to social media like Facebook and Wikipedia, their ideas of terms like collaboration and text are increasingly being challenged by the traditional academic definitions of the same terms. Through a stronger emphasis of studying the spaces in which these definitions are being challenged, we can better gauge when to learn from this technology, and when to teach to the technology(Gerben, Conclusion).” Here is where I feel we see the crux of Gerben's argument. He seems to suggest that teachers should consider digital platforms like Facebook as a means to engage their students in collaborative learning, specifically to gain an understanding of these digital platforms so we can understand how to use them if necessary.
What's most interesting to me is the idea Gerben suggests that people are writing more than ever with the advent of social media. Outside of classroom, people are using these websites to participate in conversations. Conversations about random, everyday things, but conversations, in what I would argue are kind of like participating in academic discourse in a far more informal format.
While Gerben uses Facebook as his primary source to discuss how collaborative learning is perpetuated and this works well, I think Twitter would have been a better fit. Not only does Twitter also allow for large social groups to participate in writing and comment on each others posts, what is most interesting about Twitter in a collaborative sense is the forced limit of 140 characters. Twitter, by doing this, is imposing limits on the writing, forcing users to write with brevity and consider carefully what words and phrases they use. In so doing, Twitter is allowing people to practice a writing skill on a regular basis, while watching other people's attempts to do the same. Twitter in a way is already a writing class tool by design.
Curse that bird.
The second article I read, “Fighting the Fear: Plagiarism and Technophobia” by Lanette Cadle, is about how the advent of technology in writing has increased the potential for plagiarism (and the ease of catching said plagiarism), but more importantly, increased student and teacher fear of the practice and how it can negatively affect the flow of a classroom.
“This unreasoned fear, one heightened beyond circumstance, affects more than just writing teachers with technophobia or even writing teachers in general. It also affects students. In some ways, current students are the children of fear. They fear writing, and justifiably so, since the past ways of doing writing well have been stripped from them by overly-rigid and proprietary concepts of intellectual property that have become mainstreamed by organizations such as the RIAA. These students "know" that they must do original work or be plagiarists, but at the same time, they also "know" that all past knowledge is owned by others, leaving them no tools to work with(Cadle, Echoes).
This notion in particular is very interesting to me, because I can honestly state I've felt that fear. At what point do I cite? When do I say I had an original thought? And this fear comes even after years of composition classes and successfully (I hope) writing papers for various classes. There was always an air of uncertainty for me. This leaves me to wonder how worried first-year writing students get about their work. In appointments for papers in my work at the writing center I've seen students avoid quoting information altogether, as they seemed to be paralyzed and afraid they was cite wrong, or get tagged for plagiarism. To be fair, the plagiarism note on every syllabus is intimidating, both in its writing and implication. No one wants to lose all their effort because they mis-cited a source.
Cadle gives some solutions to help avoid this fear, and coming from a composition
background, I can say I enjoy her ideas. Specifically, she says to create assignments that are specific, and not generic ones not engineered specifically for the class. I can see how this helps because it avoids giving students an easy template they can use information from another source from unattributed. Another interesting point she makes is that students should be educated on plagiarism. In my entire college career, I've only had someone take the class aside and teach us about plagiarism once. And this was by the time I've got to grad school. To most students, plagiarism is an amorphous blob of potential trouble that looms over their shoulder whenever they sit down to write a paper. If we take some of the mysteriousness out of plagiarism, students might be able to properly avoid it.
While no one should take a large chunk out of their time to teach the use of new media, Cadle makes the point that it should be considered. The internet and digital spaces are something that students should be educated on, lest they fear the havoc it can cause on their academic experiences. The issue for me is figuring out how exactly to work that in. As an advocate of practice being the best way for people to get used to it, I think having writing assignments using digital spaces might be the best way. We teach students to write papers, so why not blog posts or other forms of writing they're more likely to come in contact with on a regular basis?
Lanette Cadle's "Fighting The Fear: Plagiarism and Technophobia" http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/Cadle/fightfear.html
Gerben's "Putting 2.0 and Two Together"
http://candcblog.org/Gerben/
Both of the articles I decided to read come from Computers and Composition. According to the blurb on the website, under the section for Theory Under Practice. “Composition as a discipline is constantly evolving, changing its teaching practices in keeping with innovations in theory and technology. Therefore, Theory into Practice strives to illuminate these evolving connections between theories, computer technologies, and pedagogical practices.” While this is just a section of the journal, from what I see of the articles it seems this focus is firmly placed on how writing and teaching writing is affected by the advent of new technologies.
My first article, “Putting 2.0 and Two Together: What Web 2.0 Can Teach Composition About Collaborative Learning, has a fairly self-explanatory title. The article concerns itself with how websites, specifically digital platforms and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and such can be used to teach collaborative learning by way of offering a place to put out writings to be looked at by many sets of eyes while simultaneously allowing many people to have a voice and comments on that writing.
“Overlooking this sharp divide, I ask compositionists to look closer at the where of textual production and collaborative community formation; as student-users turn to social media like Facebook and Wikipedia, their ideas of terms like collaboration and text are increasingly being challenged by the traditional academic definitions of the same terms. Through a stronger emphasis of studying the spaces in which these definitions are being challenged, we can better gauge when to learn from this technology, and when to teach to the technology(Gerben, Conclusion).” Here is where I feel we see the crux of Gerben's argument. He seems to suggest that teachers should consider digital platforms like Facebook as a means to engage their students in collaborative learning, specifically to gain an understanding of these digital platforms so we can understand how to use them if necessary.
What's most interesting to me is the idea Gerben suggests that people are writing more than ever with the advent of social media. Outside of classroom, people are using these websites to participate in conversations. Conversations about random, everyday things, but conversations, in what I would argue are kind of like participating in academic discourse in a far more informal format.
While Gerben uses Facebook as his primary source to discuss how collaborative learning is perpetuated and this works well, I think Twitter would have been a better fit. Not only does Twitter also allow for large social groups to participate in writing and comment on each others posts, what is most interesting about Twitter in a collaborative sense is the forced limit of 140 characters. Twitter, by doing this, is imposing limits on the writing, forcing users to write with brevity and consider carefully what words and phrases they use. In so doing, Twitter is allowing people to practice a writing skill on a regular basis, while watching other people's attempts to do the same. Twitter in a way is already a writing class tool by design.
Curse that bird.
The second article I read, “Fighting the Fear: Plagiarism and Technophobia” by Lanette Cadle, is about how the advent of technology in writing has increased the potential for plagiarism (and the ease of catching said plagiarism), but more importantly, increased student and teacher fear of the practice and how it can negatively affect the flow of a classroom.
“This unreasoned fear, one heightened beyond circumstance, affects more than just writing teachers with technophobia or even writing teachers in general. It also affects students. In some ways, current students are the children of fear. They fear writing, and justifiably so, since the past ways of doing writing well have been stripped from them by overly-rigid and proprietary concepts of intellectual property that have become mainstreamed by organizations such as the RIAA. These students "know" that they must do original work or be plagiarists, but at the same time, they also "know" that all past knowledge is owned by others, leaving them no tools to work with(Cadle, Echoes).
This notion in particular is very interesting to me, because I can honestly state I've felt that fear. At what point do I cite? When do I say I had an original thought? And this fear comes even after years of composition classes and successfully (I hope) writing papers for various classes. There was always an air of uncertainty for me. This leaves me to wonder how worried first-year writing students get about their work. In appointments for papers in my work at the writing center I've seen students avoid quoting information altogether, as they seemed to be paralyzed and afraid they was cite wrong, or get tagged for plagiarism. To be fair, the plagiarism note on every syllabus is intimidating, both in its writing and implication. No one wants to lose all their effort because they mis-cited a source.
Cadle gives some solutions to help avoid this fear, and coming from a composition
background, I can say I enjoy her ideas. Specifically, she says to create assignments that are specific, and not generic ones not engineered specifically for the class. I can see how this helps because it avoids giving students an easy template they can use information from another source from unattributed. Another interesting point she makes is that students should be educated on plagiarism. In my entire college career, I've only had someone take the class aside and teach us about plagiarism once. And this was by the time I've got to grad school. To most students, plagiarism is an amorphous blob of potential trouble that looms over their shoulder whenever they sit down to write a paper. If we take some of the mysteriousness out of plagiarism, students might be able to properly avoid it.
While no one should take a large chunk out of their time to teach the use of new media, Cadle makes the point that it should be considered. The internet and digital spaces are something that students should be educated on, lest they fear the havoc it can cause on their academic experiences. The issue for me is figuring out how exactly to work that in. As an advocate of practice being the best way for people to get used to it, I think having writing assignments using digital spaces might be the best way. We teach students to write papers, so why not blog posts or other forms of writing they're more likely to come in contact with on a regular basis?
Lanette Cadle's "Fighting The Fear: Plagiarism and Technophobia" http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/Cadle/fightfear.html
Gerben's "Putting 2.0 and Two Together"
http://candcblog.org/Gerben/