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Collaborative document formatting and creation via Google Drive

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*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.

goodness, Moran’s descriptions are bewildering! I wonder how much they made sense or didn’t to his original audience. how many of his readers would be familiar enough with these systems to picture exactly the procedures and commands he references so matter-of-factly? it’s hard to imagine any kind of pedagogy/technology article being written in quite the same style today. there are so many options and customizations and different systems to be used. most audiences would surely demand more background info on anything like what Moran tries to explain.
I’m using drupal this semester in my 420 class, and my students and I are both bewildered by that too. I’m kind of jealous of thy easy-sounding, engaged way Moran seems to use what he has. I’m not to that stage yet. drupal is so foreign. it’ll be ages before I figure it out enough to make things happen so neatly in class.
maybe when I figure it out, it will facilitate awesome and unique things for my teaching and my students’ composing processes. this is the theme of the other two pieces: technologies changing our writing and revision habits. I know they have changed mine. the old need to recopy things from paper to screen once facilitated and encouraged different writing habits. for some people, that sort of sub-process might still show up. sometimes I do write or draft on paper and revise from those copies as I type. and like Sam talked about with the placeholders she uses, I do similar things. I get very messy with my typed drafts. dashes and bold and asterisks and all caps and question marks all over in the holes where I don’t know what I’m trying to say yet. if I didn’t have the option of so easily copying/pasting, find-and-replace-ing, or typing nonsense only to ruthlessly erase it later, I would probably be much less likely to draft the way I do.

It’s funny to read these articles after a round of perusing cries of “texting is ruining our students’ writing!” and “reliance on technology is melting their brains!” (Which is an overdramatization….but not by that much).

We hear a lot about how our students are digital natives, yet out of the three, Moran and Holt’s articles particularly resonate with me because every year I’m in a classroom I’ve seen the exact opposite. It’s not the advanced computing students are struggling with (like tackling InDesign, or learning how to program). It’s simple things, like knowing you can use the TAB key to indent a consistent amount of spaces, or that commands like ctrl + z is a shortcut for undoing mistakes. Having access to computers isn’t enough…without direct instruction and activities that take advantage of our unique options, students are no better off than if they compose on paper. If anything, they’re worse. And that’s not even touching on the difficulties for students who didn’t have life-long access.

It goes along with what we talked about last week…technology doesn’t ruin our thought processes, but it does change the way we process information. And, if we take advantage of features in the programs we use, we can help our students adopt new ways of thinking that will improve their writing, simply by drawing their attention to new options.

I’m sure there are a bunch of examples that I could list, and others could come up with even more, but going off of Holt’s (and Sommer’s) observation that students are more likely to delete and replace than revise, it can be useful to have students compose in something like Google Docs. Like so many, I know I’m terrible about keeping multiple documents for my various revisions. I, too, just delete and replace. It feels cleaner and, for someone with my attention span, it means I don’t have to try and figure out which copy was actually my “better” one. But platforms like Google Docs or online Wiki pages give writers easy access to the document’s history, allowing them to switch between versions and see changes without risk of losing what they’ve done. Without complicating students’ organization and file folders, there’s a way to get them to reflect on their changes in a concrete way; it just needs to be pointed out and (as Moran suggests) built into structured activities until it becomes common place.

I’ve also found that I personally do better with organizing my research if I use a blog rather than notecards, and I’ve started showing this to my students as well. Most of them already think in terms of tags and keywords thanks to hashtags and word clouds. Since blog entries allow multiple tags and instantaneous sorting, I find it easier to organize myself and to reference as I write. It’s not all that different from the pen and paper approach I was taught, but the tech itself allows me to work faster and make more complex connections because other sites have already made tagging and searching second nature.

After parsing through today’s readings, I find myself continuing to think about the implications of the idea of the computer as an entity that seems to operate outside of the writing process, as something for which new processes (such as revision) needed to accommodate, as something that causes people like Kantrov to point out that “what is critical is how teachers choose to employ the technology in their classrooms and computer laboratories” (63).

Indeed, in light of these readings, I find myself preoccupied by similar concerns that have already been posed by others here. Like Sherri, I wonder how far we have really come and if the ways that we think about the intersection of computers and writing processes have really progressed in any meaningful way. And, like Alisha, I too wonder about the writing processes of experienced and inexperienced writers and how we might navigate the challenges we face in working on such processes with students.

And I’m also struck by something that Kantrov argues: “The greater access students have to more appropriately designed tools, the less students and instructors will have to struggle to accommodate the technology to the composition course’s goals” (73). Namely, I wonder, here, how it is that we might realistically help students garner access to such tools and how the idea of access informs the way we think about computers and composition.