Response to Being Digital, Negroponte and Papert

Is Facebook the answer to Mathland? How do we self-motivate students to want to write and desire to write? While this question does seem an oxymoron, since motivating anyone to do anything isn’t self-motivation, but the question still remains relevant. It seems to me that Facebook and similar technologies have achieved something important and powerful; they have provided the means for people to want to write, to want to respond to ideas that intrigue them and make them think; yet inside a writing classroom writing is considered a completely different notion altogether. How do you equate writing on Facebook and other social technologies to writing inside of an academic classroom that seems stale and dead? I think once we learn to teach writing in a different form, a form that allows and privileges students writing through these social technologies, then the writing class will be changed for the better.

It surprises me that the writing class, and academic classrooms for that matter, has hardly changed in the last 150 years even in the face of these new and exciting technologies. Why has the academy been so hesitant to adopt these technologies and allow them to open up new worlds of academic thought for their students? Sure I think teachers and the academy are scared to learn technologies that they fear their students might actually be more knowledgeable about then they are, but I don’t think fear is an excuse for this blatant disregard of technology. Why do we consider Facebook and other similar social technologies inferior or insufficient to be used for classroom purposes, when there is obviously so much potential in these technologies for self-motivated writing? I don’t know. Maybe it is because the kind of writing that currently takes place in these technologies is so horrible that it would be a travesty to consider it academic writing. However, these technologies have yet to be tapped for their full potential in the academy, and I think that once we adopt and start using these technologies in the academy we will see a dramatic change in student and academic writing altogether. But first I think we will have to reconsider our notions of privileged and unprivileged discourse in the academy before any of these social technologies will have any effect on academic writing. I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens.

Response to Atkinson

I enjoyed Atkinson’s article on post-process writing, since I hadn’t considered the criticism on process writing before writing it. The notion that Atkinson makes in his article that literacy is much more than simply reading and writing and is instead a collection of social activities that influence our entire concept of language and literacy, makes perfect sense to me. Language lies at the heart of what writing is, and our social activities influence our language so much and as result of this our concept of writing is thus wrapped up in these social activities as well. However, it seems to me, that these social activities are hardly ever given a thought inside a freshmen composition course, and instead the teachers champion the academic essay in which the students write about subjects that are dead to them and have no bearing on their lives whatsoever. It seems to me, that if students are to be truly literate in this social world they must address and respond to these social activities of which they are a part of through writing, through their expression of a social language.

I see these social activities going hand in hand with the power struggle that exists within the process centered classroom. It is the power that defines what ideas are privileged over others, and what is and isn’t appropriate to discuss and write about in a writing class. The struggle between the teacher and students sets the stage for who holds the power, while the ultimate power holder is the grade. No matter how much power the students are given, it is all a front, since the only true power that exists in the classroom is the grade. How do you address the social realm of language and writing in a classroom that is ultimately defined by a power structure build on letter grades? Yet at the same time, how do you remove that power structure and still maintain a successful writing classroom? After all, everyone knows that freshmen only write in these classes because of the final grade. The notion of self-motivation lies at the heart of this, and I think it will ultimately be the self-motivating classroom that is successful in getting students to write about and address the social world that they are a part of. I just hope that Facebook isn’t the answer to all of this.

Response to Haswell and Commenting

Before reading Richard Haswell’s article on Responding to Student Writing, I hadn’t given much thought to commenting. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the fact that I’ve never been in a position of power to judge and grade student writing before. While I did work in the Writing Center during my time as an undergraduate, I only provided thoughts and suggestions to student’s writing and never passed judgment or assigned grades to their writing. Now that I’m in a position where I’m force to respond to the student’s writing and assign an actual grade to it, I’m also forced to consider how my comments will affect the student. I do believe very strongly that comments play a huge part in how students learn to become better writers; it certainly helped me in my writing experience and while I don’t necessarily think that it is the only way students learn to write, I do think feedback and adapting to feedback is a necessary part in anyone’s writing education, especially college freshman.

It seems strange to me when I mention to people that I was forced to take freshman composition at my undergrad they always have the same response of: really? I think I learned a lot about writing during that course, things that I probably hadn’t even considered during my writing life in high school and I am grateful for that. Looking back at that course, I can’t remember what assignments I had to complete or what the actual material we covered was. But the one thing that I always seem to remember is the impression I had after reading my instructor’s comments, simply because they often pointed out things that I hadn’t thought of to write about. Before that class I never had any teacher thoughtfully respond to my writing; it was always “great job!” or worthless comments that didn’t help me whatsoever. I never had comments about how to actually improve my writing. And while a lot of people in this program didn’t take freshman composition, and probably never needed it, I still see a huge amount of benefit in it mostly because of the feedback in teacher’s comments. It’s these comments that allow the student to hear other ideas and forces them to make a conscious decision about their writing that ultimately allows them to write better. The complexity theory, or whatever it’s called, which makes the theory of evolution makes perfect sense when applied to writing and commenting. Giving feedback as a teacher and allowing students to adapt to that feedback is a natural process of writing, and I think that this goes hand in hand with writing pedagogy.

Response to Last Week and Winsor

Since I didn’t write a response last week and my student conscious has made me feel awfully guilty about it, I’ll try and remember the topic of last week and attempt a response to it.

I extremely like Winsor’s notion of writing as invention because it’s something that I believe in but never knew it until I read her article. For me writing allows us, especially in a collaborative environment or community, to invent new ideas and new knowledge that wouldn’t otherwise have been made known to the community. What the act of writing does is it forces us to assign a language to abstract thoughts so that we can articulate those thoughts to others. The act of writing itself is social since it is meant to be read by others, and it allows others to respond to and think about these ideas in relation to their own. So by writing a thought down and articulating it in language and sharing it with others, it creates new knowledge with others in the community that then becomes shared by the community as a whole. So in this sense, writing is epistemic but not by itself. It is epistemic through a community and in the community. It is the communal aspect of writing that invents and creates, because much like an open forum that is always shifting and changing, writing is also shifting and changing through the community that it is a part of.

Taking this idea of writing and placing it in a community and site such as a blog or online forum, it’s easy to see the power in this. Looking at an online forum’s timeline and seeing all the written responses to other pieces of writing and seeing how new ideas are being considered and shaped within the community of the forum is a very powerful thing. It allows for new ideas to be invented and created within that community, and it is the community that assigns meaning and power to those ideas. Now taking this idea of writing and applying it to a freshman composition course, it creates numerous possibilities and ideas to be invented within the communal class, and it’s precisely these new ideas that give students the ability to think of things they hadn’t considered before and write about them. So then the act of writing becomes perpetual: initial writing is followed by responding writing which is then followed by more responding writing in a cycle that has no limits. And I think this is one of the great and amazing things of writing.