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Writing Showcase

by Al Weiss, CITES EdTech Consultant

Encouraging frequent student writing has been a central component of teaching strategies in higher education for the past 30 years. Education reform movements such as Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines have helped popularize the theoretical and empirical research that demonstrates that frequent writing helps students better comprehend, synthesize, and evaluate course material in any discipline. Because writing can be such a vital component to the higher education classroom, CITES EdTech has been exploring how online technologies can promote student writing by evaluating new technologies and working with faculty. Recently, we have been very impressed by how developments in both discussion board software and newer Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and wikis, have facilitated new opportunities for using writing in the classroom. We have found that these technologies not only encourage frequent writing, but offer new and better opportunities for students to engage in collaborative writing, to undertake frequent and transparent revision, and to create new and expanded audiences for student work. In this article we profile Joe Grohens, Robert Baird, and Christian Sandvig, three Urbana instructors who have been leading the way in using innovative methods and software to incorporate and teach writing in their courses.

Joe Grohens

In his Business and Technical Writing courses Joe Grohens uses wikis as the primary writing platform for student work. According to Grohens, wikis provide an excellent platform for teaching critical writing skills such as revision and rewriting. Because edits are recorded and accessible through the history tab in each wiki, Grohens is not only able to see when and how a document has been edited, but he is able to discuss the revision process with his students. Through focusing on this transparent editing and revision process, Grohens is able to help the students learn the importance of good drafting and revision in writing - a concept that many undergraduates find difficult. In addition to teaching revision, Grohens also uses the wiki software to encourage collaborative writing and peer review. Because wiki software allows multiple users to directly edit the text on a page, students can work together on writing assignments or easily place comments on a peer's work. As the students work on collaborative texts and directly on each others writing, Grohens claims that the students create a sense of shared purpose and community around their writing assignments. According to Grohens, this sense of community is not tangential to their learning. Rather this sense of shared purpose has a direct impact on the amount of time the students invest in helping and teaching each other to improve their writing. Grohens Page

Robert Baird

Film Studies Professor Robert Baird also believes that community is a vital component in college writing. In Baird’s view, academic writing is not a solitary act, but a communal process where writers gain feedback and support for their work through all stages of the writing process. To help introduce his students to the practices and procedures of writing within a community, Baird makes extensive use of the discussion boards in Illinois Compass. Baird does not want the discussion tool to be a discrete or isolated component of the course. Rather, Baird sees the discussion tool as a sandbox for the development of student writing - writing that can then be publicly and transparently incorporated into the many different venues of the course. In particular, he wants his students to engage in a written conversation, where the course readings, student comments, and lectures are synthesized, rebutted, and elaborated on in a written form. To create this type of community, Baird uses the discussion boards in Compass before, during, and after a face-to-face class. Before a class, he has some of his students respond to film screenings, readings, and other course material. Baird then brings that material into class and uses it to frame the discussion and lecture for the day, as well as to show off exemplary work. After a class session, other students are required to synthesize the discussion, offer critiques of positions, and elaborate on unanswered questions or outstanding problems. During this process, Baird has his students use the peer review functions in Compass to both have the students give each other feedback and help foster the idea that writing occurs within a community. Baird Page

Christian Sandvig

The audience for student writers does not have to be confined to the classroom. Web 2.0 software facilitates writing in forums that are open to the worldwide community of readers on the Internet. Speech Communications Professor Christian Sandvig has his students post to their own blogs for the writing component in his course to take advantage of this broad audience. Sandvig uses frequent student writing in his teaching to help his students grapple with and understand the complex theoretical issues dealt with in media studies. However, when he began teaching a large introductory class, Sandvig was concerned that he would not be able to give students the feedback or encouragement necessary for students to do stellar writing.To overcome these problems, Sandvig had his students post to a publicly accessible blog. While Sandvig still had to give considerable feedback to his students, the public venue for student writing that the blog provided helped encourage the students to work extra hard to create good writing. In addition, because the students were creating work for an audience that was potentially worldwide, they spent considerable time and effort in thinking about and writing their blog assignments. Despite using the blog to make the course very writing intensive, Sandvig reports that not all students saw the blog as creating a chore or extra work for the class. In mid-semester and end-of-semester class surveys, several of his students reported that blogs were the best part of the course - not a comment that is usually associated with writing assignments. Sandvig Page