One thing that I like to do when having students write an argumentative paper (researched, non-researched, OpEd, etc.) is have everyone get in a Google doc and I have them write their tentative thesis on separate lines. Then I have them write underneath each others’ theses contrary arguments. I encourage them to be as antagonistic as possible in order to highlight the counterarguments. Because the workspace allows for anonymous feedback and posting, they can be as free as they want. And since everyone is participating they can see it as a fun and not a hateful enterprise. This facilitates more thorough discussion of counterarguments, as well as discussions of the ethics of web-based, anonymous writing.

The really weird thing is that I’m not sure when the last time I’ve actually had students specifically use word processors in class was… games, yes. Audacity/Garage Band, yes. Photoshop/InDesign, yes. Word, nope. I think it comes from the fact that I think that timed writing is pretty much the devil. Don’t get me wrong I will occasionally ask people to jot down ideas for discussion purposes, but that’s usually in a non-computer classroom. In the computer classroom I ask them to do something else to generate ideas. Idea mapping, blogging, tweeting, anything else…out of time.

1. Podcasts
2. Youtube (making videos – like a practice presentation)
3. videos (assessing presentations – loading videos to course site and having students self-assess, primarily focused on speaking skills)
4. learner corpora
5. Facebook – class group for discussion of readings
6. google docs (collaborative processing, peer-feedback)
7. research
8. online discourse communities
9. blackboard (ew)
10. blogs
11. wikis

Blogging

Collaborative document formatting and creation via Google Drive

3D Design & printing

Instructable design

Email peer review

Photoshop

Document Design

Presentations

Reading/viewing

Research

*Teaching document design using Photoshop/inDesign
*Having students do on-the-fly research during discussions/debates
*Collaborative and simultaneous editing of documents in Google Docs
*Remediating written documents into audio formats using Audacity
*Creating board game components (boards, cards, figure designs)
*Editing Wikipedia

I use computers to discover alternative examples of genres. For example, my students are writing a narrative and I want them to identify uncommon examples of narratives such as commercials and advertisements that can help them to incorporate innovative techniques into their writing style. I also use the computer classroom as a collaborative space where students share their documents and create new documents (mostly in Google Drive) as a way to perform peer review and topic ideation.

I asked about space because I’m gonna ask my students to redesign the physical computing space today! But that’s probably not what you wanted to hear. Still, I think navigating around monitors and equipment can present a challenge.

In other ways, I like to have my students do quick research in the classroom for mini-debates during research units, asking them to perform all the normal checks on sources (vetting as best they can) in very short windows with the goal of gathering as much evidence as possible. (I hope) it makes them think about the way they read information online and how they evaluate it.

(but lots of other things too because dangit y’all all listed multiple examples and I was just doing one and now I feel like it’s not good enough o man)

One of the themes that cropped up consistently between these articles is the barrier of complex user interfaces and hardware limitations in early word processing setups. It is difficult to imagine trying to compose a piece of writing on a screen that can only handle a few lines of text at a time—and I’ve grown up with computers my entire life. Compounding the difficulty of merely seeing what you want to write, there seemed to be a huge barrier to entry in learning keyboard shortcuts and functions to make the word processor copy, paste, format paragraphs, etc. I have a hard enough time teaching my mother how to Ctrl+C to copy, let alone trying to teach a whole class a suite of shortcuts that they’ll need to rearrange the texts they have produced.

The Moran piece “Using What We Have” was fascinating, both in terms of seeing early collaborative writing exercises being explained and in how completely alien some of these programs/procedures sounded in relation to my computing experience. I have no idea what Interchange is and the naming conventions that he was using for his file directories were a bit foreign to me as well. I can’t imagine having read this at the time of its original publication. I can’t imagine reading this as a teacher with little or no computer experience because the article was written in a way that presumed a pretty sophisticated level of knowledge.

How I wish SLW and R/C didn’t view one another as Uncle Jimmie Joe Bob at the annual family reunion no one really wanted to go to anyways. The same conversation these articles dive into, is nearly the same conversation SLW (and CALL and digital literacies) began exploring in the early 90’s and continues to even today. Researchers wonder the effects of word processors (and other forms of digital literacies) on the SLW process: are teachers better at grammar instruction and feedback than WP or vice versa? are WP actually able to assist in SLW instruction if the data used to run WP is gathered from L1 language usage? do the squiggly cursors distract students? does spell checker actually impede the process of learning new vocabulary? do students see a whole text or a partial? what about ownership? who/what has more authority in the classroom: instructor or computer?

Most instructors will argue that we should merely turn off the many complex functions MS Word comes with – students don’t need, and shouldn’t, rely on them. However, some scholars (Li & Cumming (2001)) argue that proper instruction of word processors actually positively impacts writing instruction – to what degree is still under scrutiny. Yet the conversation of access, and how the lack of assumed access to the technologies used in the American classroom, is just beginning to ring loud enough for us to actually look up for our screens and pay attention.

The culture of our SLW students is ubiquitous throughout their writing process and interaction with digital media/literacies; many of our students may not have been granted technological privileges and have had little exposure to the modes of writing being integrated in American universities. Consequently, students may not only be struggling with linguistic components such as, grammar, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, and phonology, but they must also navigate through a digital divide created through a difference in educational context (e.g. Warschauer, 2003). Though it may be assumed that countries such as China (where most of our international students are currently from) are largely ‘developed’ in their uses of technology, Taylor, Jamieson, and Eignor (2000) found in their research that the following countries were described as not having computers in their classrooms: Bangladesh, Chile, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and various others; however, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland are known for having the means to structure curriculum around computers (p. 576). So while using the computer in an ESL (or a mainstream comp class with multilingual speakers) context has proven to have a positive effect on the students’ motivation and attitudes towards writing, Pennington (2003) explains that students’ “behavior is dictated by their knowledge and understanding of the [technology]” they are interacting with (p. 408). In other words, students’ attitudes, based on their previous experiences, directly affect their interactions with the new modes of writing being introduced to the classroom setting.

For example: My international students in 106 last year spent more time learning and using the technology I was “forced” to teach (and they were forced to learn) than they did improving their writing skills through negotiation and collaboration. Writing quickly became the backdrop to technology’s play, and they knew it, disliked it, and rebelled against it.

“Only a small amount of text fits on the screen, and the entire text is relatively inaccessible until a printout is made.” – Christine Hult, pg 32

At first I dismissed Hult’s complaint that the screens were too small so students couldn’t access the whole text and were thus hampered in their ability to view a composition as a “whole” entity rather than a combination of parts. I figured that she was talking about old word processor machines like this:

but which we had largely moved past. I mean, have you seen the size of some of the screens that computers have? Then I realized that I was reading the article on a 13.7 x 9.5 inch screen. In realizing this I thought back to writing my answer for the 7 day prelim question just a couple weeks ago. I had written the whole thing out and was trying to revise it when I realized that I wanted to see the whole thing all at once. I wanted to make sure that it was organized nicely and that the ideas flowed well from one to another, but my little laptop screen wasn’t allowing me to do it. So I drove to campus, printed out the draft and laid the 15 pages out over several tables in HICKS and proceeded to read over and revise it pen-to-paper. This is exactly what Hult is describing when she says, “Many writers who use word processing have learned to compensate for their difficulties reading on-screen by relying on frequent printouts” (32). While I didn’t/don’t print frequently, it has been a problem for me in the past and so I have.

While I don’t agree with Hult entirely that computers have necessarily fostered and reinforced in me (or in students) a view of writing as a series of parts rather than a whole, I do see how it is difficult to actually work with a whole composition that goes beyond a few pages because of the affordances of the technologies that I have access to.