Digital Collaberation: Using Google Docs

Reading Beach et al.'s descriptions of how to use Wikis in the classroom immediately brought me back to my first experience using a Wiki. That experience was here in English 504--Fall of 2008. (It's hard to believe I've already been here for two years.) The students signed onto a Wiki to try to develop a collaborative writing assignment regarding the writing that we could give our students. I remember the assignment not going too well. All three of us in the class at the time weren't really sure what to do with a Wiki. We found the concept of editing and working with each other's texts strange. Of course, we'd all heard of Wikipedia, but we weren't very familiar with Wikis.

This situation exemplifies what McLoughlin and Lee point out as the digital divide between the "fully wired" generation and those that aren't quite so fully wired. Although I consider myself to be as tech savvy as the next person, I still wasn't fluent in the vocabulary of wikis. Although this doesn't mean wikis shouldn't be used in the classroom, it does show how challenging some instructors might find these assignments.

However, I agree with Beach et al. when they write: "Collaboration is an important skill to learn in preparation for working with others in schools and the workplace" (71). Furthermore, I also think that working collaboratively can help students "learn how to negotiate differences among opinions, ideas, and perspectives" (72).  In addition, I think that collaboration in the composition classroom has at least two more distinct benefits:

• It offers lessons in problem solving. Students have to learn to negotiate the logistics of working together. 
• It allows students to see the writing process transform before their eyes. When they see others re-organizing, making additions, and deleting information, they can work on transforming their own writing processes or at least feel confident in their writing process that may take several steps before a competent final draft is completed.

A few weeks ago, I decided to use technology in a collaborative assignment that I normally give using pen and paper in class. The assignment asks students to try writing in open and closed forms of prose. I give the students a topic (usually something like PUC lunches or parking that they are familiar with and that is at least relatively interesting), and I ask one large group to write an informative paragraph in open form and another an informative paragraph in closed form. This semester, I decided to use Google Docs. In the past, when I've done this activity with pen and paper, I've really only been able to teach one lesson--the difference between open and closed form prose. When I used Google Docs, I realized that I was able to stress three key concepts: the difference between open and closed form prose, the recursive nature of the writing process, and problem solving. As the students worked with the same document, I watched them try different strategies until they found one that worked for them; natural leaders emerged, and both groups formulated a system that allowed them to complete the assignment in the allotted time period. In addition, when I told the students they didn't have to write in a linear pattern, I was surprised at the different tactics that they tried. One student would make another student's introductory sentence the conclusion, etc. Finally, the students practiced the concept we had been studying--open and closed form prose.

Because of this experience with technology and collaboration, I would like to use more activities like this. I think these kind of collaboration techniques allow students to not only become familiar with and discuss a multitude of ideas, but it also allows students to practice the recursive nature of the writing process with others' work, teaching them to do it in their own work.

A Second Blog on Blogging

In his article, "Educational Blogging: A Forum for Developing Disciplinary and Professional Identity," author Geoffrey C. Middlebrook quotes Ruth Reyard saying that a blog "must be integrated early into the course design, and must be clearly connected to the course outcomes, before it can become anything more than just an extra task for students." Earlier in the article, Middlebrook also mentions that the most frequently chosen blog topic is a person's own experience and life. Put together, both pieces of evidence seem to imply that the care and deliberation necessary for integrating blogs into the classroom is monumental. While I think they can be a valuable tool, I would have to agree that designing specific blogging assignments with the genre in mind is of the utmost importance.

When I ask my ENG 104 students to tell me about the genre of blog (I do this every semester when we discuss genre; we discuss Facebook posts too.), they usually say that there are no rules for this newly formed genre. I posit that I don't think that's necessarily true. After all, there must be some conventions for this to be a genre. We discuss how the genre has evolved from being primarily an online diary to an effective form of communication maintained by corporations, public figures, etc. However, we also note that it continues to offer a soapbox for the common person. Despite these blog differences, what reigns supreme in the minds of my students is the fact that a blog, to them, is nothing more than a ramble.

As instructors, then, we must be sure to create blogging assignments so that students understand they are being asked to do much more than ramble. In addition, what use is it to do in a blog what can be done in a journal or on a discussion forum? This is not to say blogging is pointless, because I don't think it is, but I am of the opinion that blogging assignments must be specially designed for the genre of blog. For instance, Middlebrook did this by asking the students to make a log and tag their posts, in addition to offering multimodal assignments. Requiring an interaction component is another way to make a blog assignment right for the blog genre. However, it's important to be purposeful about what we assign as blog topics and what we assign as forum topics.

Another point Middlebrook brought up was the point of engagement. Though I think it's important to want to engage students in their assignments, we need to be careful that we don't attempt engagement at any cost. I found this video, in which students discussed why they liked using blogs. While I think that many of the reasons listed are valid ones, many of the reasons listed could also be boiled down to the fact that blogs are more "fun" tha other assignments.

While it's not wrong to give "fun" assignments because they are more engaging, assignments need to be given because they do more than JUST engage students. Middlebrook made the point that using blogs had a professional connection. I also think bogging teaches students technological composing skills they will use throughout their lives. However, I think students should be given blog assignments that really stretch and challenge them to compose in a virtual environment. Otherwise, they are just keeping online diaries.

Some of the components of an authentic blogging assignment, to me, would include:

• The use of hypertext and multimodality in posts. 
• The customization of the blog's look and feel as a rhetorical element.
• The use of tagging tools to categorize and sort posts. 
• The linking to other blogs (in and outside of class) to establish an audience and participate in a conversation. 
• The promotion of the blog using social media, SEO tools, etc.

Although these are not all elements of traditional composition, they can all be linked to writing, composing, thinking, reading, and responding. In addition, these are all tools that real-world bloggers know how to use within their disciplines.

The best defense I've heard of blogging in the classroom (as of yet) is the fact that bloggers have an "authentic" audience when they write. But how real is this supposed audience, and is it any more real than the faux audiences they have as students in the composition classroom? If students are blogging without parameters, it is likely that no one (save the instructor and maybe a few classmates) will happen on their blogs. However, with proper assignment design, blogging can be a meaningful assignment that really teaches students composition in the world of web 2.0.

Thoughts on Multimodal Assignments

As I read through the assignments in the second chapter of Selfe's Multimodal Composition, I thought to myself that I had never been given an assignment anything like what she was describing in my four years pursuing three undergraduate degrees. Not only was I never required to do a multimodal assignment of this nature in my writing classes, but I even took a class called educational technology, in which I created a Power Point presentation, hyperlinked document, and web quest. In the social sciences department, though, where I pursued my degrees in political science and international relations, I had one professor who allowed a great deal of freedom on the assignments. I took one class of his that was a WWII trip to Europe, and as the final for this course, we had to complete a project of our own choosing. I put together a sort of web site that featured a blog (my daily journal that we were requried to keep), photos from the trip, and other bits of text wrapped up in a single site I created using iWeb. I remember the professor really liking my presentation. But this is still nothing like what Selfe describes.

As I read through and view these assignments, I think that there would be many challenges. First, as was brought up in class last week, I am concerned that the students would be befuddled by the technology. While Selfe acknowledges that this is a primary concern, I am not sure she really understands the magnitude of it. I get frustrated during some semesters because my students all have a lot of problems using Blackboard. Some don't know how to use Microsoft Word. I always feel like the time I spend teaching the technology takes away from teaching and learning time in class.

On the other hand, I do believe these tools are ones that students need to learn how to use, and where better than in context? I wish my professors had required me to use them in college. I am just beginning to expermient with video on a few of the sites I maintain. If I had been introduced to the technology earlier, I think I would be much more technologically literate than I am now.

Another reason that I lead toward implementing these assignments (regardless of their challenges), is because of the grand variety of modifications I see possible. In her text, Selfe points to collaberative projects, assignment sequencing, writing about audio and video, and using audio and video as an individual alternative. Of these, I found the most beneficial to be the sequencing of assignments. Slowly building old technology on new technology is a form of scaffolding that I think works especially well in this case. I also think it might not be possible to integrate all of these technologies into one class. However, using the scaffolding technique, going at a slow pace, will likely ease this concern of mine.

I also think student choice, as Selfe brings up several times, is an important component. Students should be faced with the real-world task of deciding which type of communication is best and where. This is the challenge that faces me as I continue to develop SADC's web site. I am asking myself, which topics should be based in video? Which should be text? However, I think that this could allow students to work wtih only the modality they feel most comfortable in, something I think needs to change. Students need to be stretched. This is something that I believe Trupe would agree with. In her article, she discusses the "rich possibilities," meaning rhetorical possibilities, that students have in front of them when they create electronic texts. Choosing the medium of expression is a rhetorical choice in its own, and the electronic option allows students to be more fully engaged (meaning purposeful, thoughtful, and intentional) when they choose this medium.

As a student of multimodal composition myself, I 've been struggling! I downloaded Audacity and recorded a couple of tracks of me singing songs that I sing to my daughter. (Don't worry, I won't post them.) Then I tried to make a movie with pictures of my daughter, but somehow I've deleted the program and can't figure out how to install the plugin! This is the exact issue I fear I would have with my students!

Technology Narrative

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had developed a profoundly adamant yet incorrect opinion that I was from a very wealthy family. In reality, poor would have been generous. My grandmother, a nurse, worked midnights to support my mother, a grad student, and myself, a voracious eater. Mom drove a barely blue Buick with a flaking, illegal tint job that was being eaten by rust and smelled like vomit. Grammy’s house was huge, but it lacked many of the basic necessities, like heat on an entire side and real flooring. And in her early twenties, mom was still living in the bedroom she had kept as a child.

But as a preschooler, I didn’t see the faltering sedan, the third-rate paint jobs, and the plywood flooring. All I saw was the bag phone, the computer, the printer, and the VCR. My friends didn’t have these things, and so I assumed that because my family did, it meant that I was “richer” than they were. Of course, now I realize how faulty my logic was and how ridiculous it was to be evaluating my wealth against my friends’ in the first place. But this incident does show that, even from a young age, I took special notice of technology and realized that it was a tool that some embraced while others ignored. Today, I am grateful that my family was the technologically embracing kind.

 A New Computer

We may have been big on technology in my family, but we were short on heated space, so, for some reason, the computer ended up in my room when I was in early elementary school. This was one of the earliest computers whose screen looked more like a mini television than an actual educational tool. It had a blinking green icon on a black screen, and there were a few games that looked as if they’d just come from the Atari, but I loved it all the same, that is, except when my mother was using it late into the night typing her papers for grad school. I was in about the third grade when mom received an extraordinarily large box that I was told contained a new computer. And this computer, to my nine-year-old mind, was top-of-the-line. It came with seven, that’s right seven, CD-roms, which contained pictures of the world’s seven wonders, games, and an encyclopedia. How much fun I had browsing and playing with them all. And then the best part—this computer could PLAY CDs! That’s right! We didn’t even have a CD player, but when we got the computer, mom bought me two CDs—the soundtrack to Aladdin and a “fun in the sun” mix that featured “Walking on Sunshine.” I was able to play them while I sat in her office chair that was still crammed into her old bedroom, and I was in heaven.

Little did I know then that I would come to spend many hours on this and the various subsequent computers my family purchased throughout my childhood. Struggling to make sense of my place in our family, I often found the computer and Internet a reliable escape where I could disappear into other worlds, through reading fanfiction, connect with people outside my immediate circle, through the chat rooms that were all the rage of the 1990s, and learn, through the informational web sites that I browsed, though I admit they were mostly related to my favorite TV show, The X-Files. When AIM became big, my “secret boyfriend,” whom I later married, carried out a long courtship in front of our forbidding, but technologically illiterate parents’ eyes. A child of the computer age, we had computers, games, and the Internet in school, but when it comes to the “cool stuff”—Napster, video slideshows, forums, and chat rooms—I taught myself.

Educational Technology

Unlike the partying my friends did, my evenings and weekends online prepared me for a campus life that had gone digital. Upon entering college in 2004, I was immediately tasked with Blackboard assignments, Power Point presentations, and hyperlinked documents. While my peers struggled to make it through, the work was second nature to me. I increasingly went above and beyond my instructors’ requests when it came to technology, and for the effort I was always rewarded. Though, again, I took only one, one-credit-hour class on “educational technology,” I taught myself to make professional looking slideshows, utilize discussion boards and make tear-jerking musical slideshows to augment poetry presentations. When I taught my first course as an undergrad—I was a peer instructor for a freshman experience type course—I had changed the curriculum to integrate the use of forum posts and film.

Turning to the Future

Though my perceptions about technology and wealth have certainly changed—the iMac, Macbook, and iPhone I keep in my budget apartment are necessary tools, not toys—I am grateful for my technologically literate upbringing. Through it, I not only taught myself to use the latest digital tools, but I also learned how to quickly adapt to new and changing technologies. This is how I’ve been successful teaching, writing, and serving as a webmaster online. The concepts are the same; the tools are just different. And thanks to Web 2.0, my emotional reasons for turning to and being satisfied with technology are the same. Able to live an authentic digital life through Facebook, IM, and other applications, I enhance my reality with the constant presence of my real, tangible, though digital, support network.

A Link

I got this in my NCTE Inbox this week, and I thought you all might be interested:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/07/wikipedia

It is about professors' using Wikipedia editing as assignments.

To Blog or Not to Blog: Thoughts on Assignment #1

I write this post sitting in a camp chair on my front porch--the kind with the beverage holders. In one holder sits a diet Pepsi, in the other my iPhone, which lays ready to alert me of any incoming texts. In addition to this browser window, I have nine others open: Craigslist, my e-mail, Facebook, the weather (so I can go in before it starts to rain), Pandora (which is playing a customized station), two recipes I'm interested in making, the English 605 web site, and a Wiki. In the background, my Stickies application reminds me of my to do list, along with an inspirational quote and iTunes stands ready, in case Pandora should fail. My current Word and Power Point projects are minimized, not closed, in case inspiration strikes. There's no question that I understand and can sympathize with my student's muli-tasking and ability to live authentic online lives. By this I mean online lives in which they create reality, not just record reality. However my attempt to bring multimodal texts into my classroom as a way to meet my student's at their points of interest, help them engage in tasks that will benefit them after college, and engage them in the writing process have fallen flat. Perhaps it is my application of these technologies that has been problematic, not the technologies themselves.

In the first chapter of Cynthia Selfe's Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers, the author gives five reasons for giving multimodal assignments followed by five questions that composition teachers are likely to raise about such compositions. Selfe's reasons include the fact that multimodal texts are often more engaging and more practical to today's students than are simple print texts, in addition to the fact that multimodal texts can be used to teach rhetorical devices in the same way that they are taught using text. In fact, I've often found that multimodal texts are better examples for teaching about rhetorical analysis, rehtorical decision-making, and rhetorical appeals than are print texts. Indeed, the authors of both texts seem to suggest that digital, or multimodal texts, may simply be more rhetorically effecitve in some contexts.  Indeed, Beach, Anson, Breuch, and Swiss argue that "digital writing tools...encourage students to learn to voice their ideas on their own initiative" (13), and Selfe asks, "When was the last time you or anyone in your class was moved to tears by a student composition" (4)?

Although I admit that a student composition from last semester did move me to tears, a more moving moment occurred in my ENG 104 class at the end of Fall semester 2009. Just beginning to incorporate digital and multimodal assignments into my classroom, I allowed my students to use a multimodal platform for their position piece. Only one student took me up on it, and she produced a musical slide show to advocate her position that Americans are too obsessed with the media. To the background of a emotional melody, she juxtaposed photos of starving children with those of stars like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. She used text to incorporate statistics about the number of starving people on earth and the amount of money spent on movie productions. Both my students and I found this presentation moving, and it suggested that incorporating multimodal texts into my classroom would inspire more authentic expression.

But then, in the spring of 2009, I tried to integrate blogs, and the results weren't positive. Before integrating the blogs, I asked one of Selfe's five key questions. I wondered what I would give up by allowing my students to do blogs, and the answer was the traditional thinking and writing journal entries I had done in class. However, I thought my blog posts would be better because they would allow the students to engage in real reflection and analysis since they knew I would be reading the blogs from time to time, and they knew that their classmates would also be reading the blogs. But I found that the students didn't do real reflection. Instead, they just tried to get assignments out of the way, were too caught up on the logistics, and in the student evaluations repeatedly told me that they did not like the blogs. Incidentally, I am not blogging this semester.

I am not blogging this semester, but I am still integrating online discussion (Blackboard) and the option to make certain assignments multimodal assignments in my English 104 class. In my advocacy writing class at Portage Christian School, since I've written the curriculum myself and I only have two students, I am hoping to add a unit on multimodal writing. This shows that I still have faith in this type of writing even if it didn't work for me the first time. Why, you ask?

1. Everything I've read has suggested that multimodal writing can be intellectually challenging, stimulating, and enhancing to students. The research I've seen also suggests students create more authentic texts when they have a real audience. In 2009, I participated in the NWIWP writing project, and I studied multigenre writing. My research paper (published here, though it seems not to be completely functional at the moment. I have a FB in about it: http://nwiwp.pbworks.com/Multigenre-Writing-2009) was written in multigenre form, and it was a lot of fun for me to write poems, articles, and menus about the research rather than just another research paper. I imagined that it would be fun for my students to do this as well. 
2. I wish someone had taught me more about multimodal composition in college. Much of it, I've had to figure out on my own, and because I do a lot of computer aided teaching/teaching online, writing for the web, and I'm the sorry excuse for SADC's web master right now, that's been imperative. My students, when they get out into the real world, will find it imperative to be technologically literate as well.

As I finish writing this post, I still have nine tabs open, and I've read three e-mails, sent three Facebook messages, written on one person's wall, taken one phone call, got the information that person was looking for by searching my Facebook messages, and transfered money to my bank via Paypal. The digital age has made me a multitasker and a person who communicates in a variety of different modes. But when it comes to using multimodal and digital texts in my classroom, I still have some bugs to work out.