hyperglyphics

Collaborative Composition in the Digital Age: A Tale of Two Classes: A Teacher’s Reflection

drelizabethdavis — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 03:38:05 +0000

So, what have we learned here? That’s the question that has plagued me ever since I conducted the collaborative assignments that I am putting on display for the 2010 CCCC workshop, Digital Media and Learning in a Social World.

In thinking more and more about collaborative writing, I have gone back time and again to various authors and experts on the subject and I found myself, in the month or so leading up to this conference, re-reading Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s 1983 essay, “Why Write…Together?” Toward the end of that piece, Ede and Lunsford pose a number of provocative and important questions about collaborative authorship, and a few of them stand out to me now that I am reviewing (yet again) the reflections of my students on their experience with multiple authorship and considering what I have to share about the process of assigning and evaluating a collaborative new media writing project. Ultimately, I think I can frame what I have learned about collaborative composition in the digital age around three of Ede and Lunsford’s questions.

Following Up

drelizabethdavis — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:29:12 +0000

The walls are within the academy, not without.
(paraphrasing Barbara Ganley, Keynote: Ecotones and
Crossroads: Re-imagining the Spaces of Learning in an
In-Between Time, Computers and Writing,
June 19, 2009)

If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same ~~flaws~~ as postmodernism: a ~~failure~~ to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.
(My revision of Andrew Sullivan, “Why I Blog”)

“[The diverse range of media we engage with] reward the capacity to make connections and to see patterns – precisely the kinds of skills we need for managing an information glut.”
(Jamais Cascio, “Get Smart/er“)

Credit Where Credit is Due

drelizabethdavis — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:31:23 +0000

Boyd, Danah. “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium.” Reconstruction. 6.4 (2006). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/boyd.shtml.

Brooks, Kevin, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe. “Remediation, Genres, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs.” Into the Blogosphere. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/remediation_genre.html.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1984.

Coe, Richard. “‘An Arousing and Fulfilment of Desires’: The Rhetoric of Genre in the Process Era – and Beyond.” Genre and the New Rhetoric. Ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994. 181- 190.

Ferdig Richard E. and Kaye D. Trammel. “Content Delivery in the Blogosphere.” THE Journal. February 1, 2004. http://thejournal.com/Articles/2004/02/01/Content-Delivery-in-the-Blogosphere.aspx.

Jerz, Dennis. “Forced Blogging: Students’ Emotional Investment in their Academic Weblogs.” Jerz’s Literacy Weblog. March 25, 2004. http://jerz.setonhill.edu/cgi-bin/mt-jerz/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=3&search=forced+blogging.

Lanham, Robert. “Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview.” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2009/4/20lanham.html.

Leaver. Tama. “Blogging Everyday Life.” Reconstruction. 6.4 (2006). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/boyd.shtml.

Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. London: Routledge, 2007.

Miller, Carolyn R. “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre.” Genre and the New Rhetoric. Ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994. 67-78.

Russell, David. “Activity Theory and Process Approaches: Writing (Power) in School and Society.” Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm. Ed. Thomas Kent. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. 96-115.

Saper, Craig. “Blogademia.” Reconstruction. 6.4 (2006). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/saper.shtml.

Sullivan, Andrew. “Why I Blog.” The Atlantic. November 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog.

Waltrip-Fruin, Noah. “Blog-Based Peer Review: Four Surprises.” Grand Text Auto. May 12, 2009. http://grandtextauto.org/2009/05/12/blog-based-peer-review-four-surprises/.Activity

Justify My Blog

drelizabethdavis — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:45:01 +0000

Anyway. First of all, we’ve got to address the question of what the term blog means. Is it a noun (a person’s blog, a blog post, a distinct genre, a mode, a format, a medium)? Is it a verb (to blog, an act, a practice, a process)? Is it both? I’d like to argue that it is both, following Danah Boyd’s injunction to scholars to “conceptualize blogging as a diverse set of practices that result in the production of diverse content on top of a medium that we call blogs.” Blogs can and do facilitate the production of many different genres. We’ve all seen blog posts that are essentially remediations of genres we are intimately familiar with from print: the personal essay, the news report, the academic argument (something this little blog text is looking like more and more!). Craig Saper notes that, in his correspondence with several academic bloggers, they often expressed a belief that blogging is merely one of a variety of legitimate options for writing and conducting research (of course, those are scholars who are already blogging, not the ones who are, at best disinterested in or, at worst, disdainful of, blogging). Thinking of them as a medium as Boyd suggests makes sense to me.

Sustainable Practice

drelizabethdavis — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:41:43 +0000

Okay, I’ve been thinking about this. Lovink notes that The Financial Times pronounced the death of the blog back in 2006 (37). Granted, that may have been a bit premature, but you know how the media is – it loves a grand pronouncement! But Lovink’s clear-eyed look at what he terms the “nihilist impulse” in blogging suggests that if these discrete, like-minded communities that collectively comprise the blogosphere remain isolated in their echo chambers, then blogging might certainly lose its appeal and potential. Lovink states, “If the blog scene disintegrates, so too might blogs as technical platforms” (38).

Media constantly evolve, but I’d like to see blogs stick around because I actually do think they have potential and value for seriously scholarly work, but only if we start to think more about that work as process and practice rather than product. (And, BTW, you were right earlier when you said I was being provocative about that). I think blogs are currently under-theorized and that’s the key.

Forced Blogging=Zero Comments

drelizabethdavis — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:57:01 +0000

Okay, let me try to explain my experience. I’ll use my Web writing classes from the past year as my examples since they are fresh in my mind and because they explicitly open the question of what function blogs (and other forms of new media writing) might serve in the halls of academe.

my goals were to essentially establish a “public sphere” in what I saw as the virtual classroom of the blog. For this class, it would have the added benefit of being an opportunity to actively practice an increasingly popular and prevalent form of Web writing.

I set up a group blog, invited the students in the classes to be co-authors (which led to a 25+ person group blog in the spring), and established the blog as a space for them to post their reading responses, noting that they could also post anything there that was related to the content of our course that they thought others might find interesting or useful. I also locked the blog so that only participants had access to it – so we had no audience but ourselves. I had hoped the space would be dynamic, collaborative, interactive, buzzing with all kinds of intellectual energy – a virtual bazaar buzzing with free exchange of ideas and clashes of agendas. A place where there was no authority, the possibilities were limitless, and brilliant critical and creative breakthroughs would occur.

Yet the blog never became the the place I imagined.

Doing it Bloggy-Style

drelizabethdavis — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:50:03 +0000

I’ve been involved with blogging as a writing instructor for several years now and, having just finished another Writing for the Web course in which we spent a great deal of time and energy talking about blogging and how (and why) to write blogs, I find I am seriously questioning my ideas about blogs and blogging both as a teacher of writing and as a researcher and (sort of, sometime) blogger.

Here’s a question: What should I be teaching Web writing students about blogging, precisely? Bloggers like lists.

How to write a money-making blog?
How to create and sustain a community of readers?
How to write a professional workplace blog?
How to use the blog in public relations or non-profit work?
How blogging is useful and/or relevant to academic work?

Scratch that last one! I can’t help you on that one. There are all kinds of ideas and advice I can give on 1-4. Tips, tricks, techniques (things like lists, alliteration, punchy titles – see above – and pithy anecdotes, hyperlinks and trackbacks, visuals and audio to capture the eye and ear of today’s multimedia-loving Web junkie). But blogging as part of an academic practice? Come on. Blogs are informal. They’re brief. They belong to the world of pop culture, mass media, techies and video gamers, journalism. They’ve got no credibility, no authority, no editors, peer reviewers or committees. They’re just places to spout off opinions, to vent, to tell people what you think is cool or interesting, to gossip and give out TMI. And then you should get a bunch of comments either TOTALLY agreeing with you, man, or flaming you for being the stupidest person alive.

There’s no academic value in blogging. Period. (Oh, yeah, being really opinionated is VITAL for being a good blogger. That’s how you get comments).