Currently, many school administrations, at all levels of education, are mandating the inclusion of newer, web-enabled technologies in the classroom. But many teachers coming from more traditional educational backgrounds struggle with making web-education effective or useful in their courses, rather than a distraction. Texting or surfing Facebook during a class is not exactly their idea of effective teaching. On the other hand, students can feel alienated in school when they find the material “irrelevant” or initially difficult to grasp; these experiences often lead to a lack of efficacy on the part of the student. What exactly I mean by “efficacy” in terms of this research paper comes from the political science definition of the term, which was originally published in 1954 as “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process” (Campbell 1954). Therefore, efficacy, in terms of my research, means not only the “Power or capacity to produce effects,” (“efficacy” OED) but also the feeling or perception that one is capable of having an impact. In a classroom where students feel woefully disconnected from the material and the goals of the class, they inevitably wrestle with a) actually performing well in a given class and b) feeling like they are able to do so. Even if they achieve good grades in a course, students may not feel like their work in class “matters” in their “real lives.” While teachers read this display of discontent from students as mere apathy, they fail to fully appreciate the intellectual and emotional challenge students are facing. By examining the most recent research on the efficacy of various digital techniques in college-level writing courses, teachers can derive better, more refined methods to help their students feel empowered, exercise their creativity, and develop as writers.
The etymology of “distracted” links to the idea of one being “torn asunder”; this is a more violent visualization of what many call “split-attention” or “having one’s attention split between multiple tasks.” While many of us enjoy thinking of ourselves as multi-taskers, in reality our effectiveness when performing anything beyond a single operation greatly diminishes. Researcher Taylor Patten Wyatt’s work centers around concern for modern learners who are immersed in the constant presence of web-enabled devices, which he claims makes focused work nearly impossible. Our devices follow us into previously “behavior-specific spaces” and funny YouTube videos and intriguing articles are a click or touch away. Achieving any kind of extended focus on one task seems more daunting than ever. “This is hardly a fair situation for beginning writers, for whom the task of drafting a coherent piece of writing is difficult enough” (Wyatt 4). Wyatt’s work is very relevant to questions about the way online writing seems to differ from traditional composition; this difference manifests itself physically in the difference between traditional, linear outlines and a web-map or thinking-map. The latter are used to show how different ideas fall under the umbrellas of other, larger concepts. However, such ideas are more scattered and do not visually represent a progression like an outline. The concepts within web mapping take place for students working online as they jump from task to task in a distracted, sporadic manner.
When we consider the research that Wyatt and others have performed concerning student writing, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which students can even begin the practical work behind writing: critical thinking. This is particularly challenging in the context of educating the newest generation of learners, who are generally internet-users. Peter Elbow revolutionized the way teachers think about what many now commonly call “freewriting” or “writing exercises.” In the second edition of his groundbreaking work, Writing Without Teachers, Elbow confesses how he personally struggled with writing: “Writing became more and more impossible. I finally reached the point where I could not write at all. I had to quit graduate school and go into a line of work that didn’t require any writing” 2 (Elbow 17). Elbow also discusses what he calls “the process of writing” in two metaphors: cooking and growing. In his introduction to the latter, he asserts that it is more productive—for your content—to write several drafts quickly; “I am merely trying to insist that you can write much more and not take longer” (Elbow 22). How is this possible? How could writing more be more efficient?
When I can write down a set of words and then write down some more and then go back and write down some more thoughts or perceptions on the topic, two odd things seem to be the case: 1. Often by looking back over them, I can find relationships and conclusions in the words that are far richer and more interesting than I could have ‘thought of by myself.’ 2. And sometimes it often feels as though these words were ‘going somewhere’ such that when they ‘got there’ best, it was because I succeeded in getting out of their way.
(Elbow 24)
Though counter-intuitive, what Elbow says is often proven accurate in practice. When we allow students to freewrite in low-stakes writing situations (i.e., situations where the assignment is not a large part of their grade), they feel less fear and a greater freedom to test out ideas because their experiments won’t be punished. Freewriting and journals can be an invaluable resource to the distracted learner: it is a physical record of their thoughts. As Elbow points out, when students review these physical thoughts later, they can then identify new, more complex ideas within their original writing; such thoughts could not have been reached without step two: getting out of the way. Throughout the book, Elbow criticizes and reprimands the internal editor within us all, the half of us that makes us write haltingly or pensively. He argues that if writers are trying to produce (write creatively and analytically) and edit (censor their work or style) at the same time, writing does become nigh impossible, as he felt it was during graduate school. If we can create a space online where students are semi-forced to ignore their internal editor, the ideas they produce as a result of their freewriting—even though it may look like spewing or even garbage—will far exceed ideas they try to conjure up in linear, fully rational ways or the self-censored environments of the mind.
While acknowledging the reality of students as distracted learners and their current lack of editor-free jotting, teachers must also recognize the importance of the internet in bringing the world of academia closer to the lived experiences of students. As a medium of communication, online writing is a way to make academic writing feel more natural and less stressful for the twenty-first century student. In a collection of essays on librarianship, librarian Tamela N. Chambers discusses how she got teens in her community more excited about reading in her chapter, “Read, Write and Rap: Connecting Teens and Tweens to Poetry through Hip-Hop Lyrics”:
Iambic pentameter and spittin’ lyrics. Is the latter the estranged offspring of heralded poets such as Shakespeare and Wordsworth? An old dog doing new tricks? Ask yourself these questions the next time you gaze in confusion at your teens and tweens as they print and trade lyrics to the latest rap songs or come across forgotten lyrics that are—ahem—a bit objectionable. The potential for educational opportunity is in these experiences.
(Chambers 123)
Instructors face the seemingly paradoxical challenge of teaching students classical, academic skills through pop-culture and modern mediums of writing and communication. However, when this balance is properly achieved, the results, as in Chambers’s experience, are incredibly gratifying. Just as Chambers uses rap to generate interest in reading and poetry, online formats and blogging can be used to rekindle students’ desire to write. In order to influence learners to invest more of their time in scholastic enterprises, teachers need to accommodate students’ extracurricular interests in the modern classroom.
“According to Gee (2001), in the New Capitalist or ‘modern’ value system of the information age, discourse and dialogue play an important role in designing identities and in having others recognize achieved identities” (Black 119).
Students’ ability to represent their own thoughts and ideas accurately is key, not only to making students more effective communicators—and therefore, better writers—but also in helping them formulate their own identities. Being able to identify one’s self with confidence as a “good writer” is something many students struggle with; they get stuck in a mindset of being “bad” at writing or it “just not being their thing.” More important than self-identification as a strong writer is getting that same, critical feedback from a peer or instructor—“having others recognize [your] achieved identities.” Students who consider themselves incapable from the outset of a course will, undoubtedly, have a difficult time performing well in the class. Helping students to reconstruct their definitions of themselves as cogent, skilled writers is vital to the success of any writing course.
In courses where there are a few high-stakes writing assignments—rather than a variety of low-stakes assignments—students’ creativity may be inhibited by their preoccupation to “write correctly,” or “write well,” rather than writing critically or complexly. Paula Gillespie is a literature professor at Marquette University who, considering this type of student experience, adapted her normal literature course into a writing-intensive course about literature through online tools. Gillespie experiments with two different sophomore level college courses on general education literature. As an advocate of WAC (writing across curriculum) and writing to learn techniques, Gillespie thought by making the class more writing-intensive, students would learn lastingly and with greater depth. However, she was also facing the dilemma most teachers face, at one point or very often: how to get students to care about a class. She also adopts an education philosophy that is anti-“memorize and regurgitate” which gave the students more flexibility, but also forced them to think independently more often. Gillespie’s decision to have students participate in a weekly electronic journal or “e-journal” made the class intensive and incredibly successful, though in different ways for the two classes she taught.
She wrote the weekly prompts for the journal to give direction to the discussion, but otherwise let the students respond to each other’s work, for the most part. “I knew that audience would make a big difference in journal writing, but I had no idea it would tie in so well the goals of the course. Students began engaging with one another as well as with the texts” (Gillespie 226). She tracked the development of student ideas throughout the semester, marking how the writers’ ideas grew more sophisticated and they became more confident in disagreeing with each other respectfully. I conjecture, from her work, that by allowing student ideas to mingle and percolate in this collaborative online format, students can draw new conclusions about a given text, as in this case, or phenomena that they could not have reached otherwise—just as Elbow suggests in his advocation of freewriting for students. The online format, gradually, allowed students to feel more comfortable, as evidenced by the way they wrote in their “student voices” (Gillespie 228) rather than fake-sounding academic jargon. By allowing this casual exchange of intellectual ideas to happen online, Gillespie better facilitated her writing to learn goals in a class students very much came to invest in.
In a case study performed by educator Nan Elsasser, a group of women at the College of the Bahamas in 1979 were able to not only pass their qualifying exams after a remedial English program, but also set up a published journal on Bahaman women’s rights and concerns. The leap from hesitant and poorly-constructed writing to self-motivated publication baffled and excited Elsasser, who was part of a group of Paulo Freire-inspired teachers adapting his radical pedagogy to different educational situations. In a letter to her fellow educators, Elsasser wrote: “It’s hard to believe that in September [1979] these women had difficulty thinking in terms of a paragraph—now they want a manifesto!” (Fiore 87). Elsasser’s success can be explained by two simple realities.
First, when Elsasser arrived on site for the course, she spent some time examining what life for the population there was really like. One thing she and others like her often found to be true was that the curriculum in use at the school did not reflect, at all, the local culture of the area and sometimes even that culture’s language. “A wide gulf stretched between the classroom curriculum and [student’s] own knowledge…Confronted by a course that negated their culture, many failed to master the skills they sought” (Fiore 88). In light of this knowledge, Elsasser allowed her group of all-female students to choose the topics for the writing course themselves. They made lists and debated and eventually came to a consensus to use marriage as the generative theme for their course. By giving the students significant power over the content and style of the course, the course became more than simply school: it is an analytical space in which to examine a phenomena that is incredibly relevant to their lived experiences beyond the classroom.
Second, the students were given the space and time to write and rewrite extensively on this topic, a topic they cared about. While the initial goal was for the women to pass their exams, they ended up not only becoming better writers, but also more active writers and citizens. The collaborative style of class-time allowed students to improve their skills by correcting their work as a large group and refining their ideas on the subject. Through this process, they came to redefine the purpose of writing but more importantly, redefine themselves as powerful actors in their world. “Through this approach, students will achieve literacy in the truest, most profound sense. They will understand ‘their reality in such a way that they increase their power to transform it’ (de Oliveria & de Oliveria, 1976)” (Fiore 103). When teachers include students’ previous knowledge and allow them to further examine it through writing, they provide an incredible opportunity for self-discovery and greatly enhanced confidence in written communication.
Considering the above research and the work of other scholars, the following is a list of five recommendations for ways to implement online learning strategies into your writing curriculum. All of these techniques can be modified to accommodate a high school classroom, but were originally designed with university students in mind. All are created with the intent to increase student efficacy in a lasting manner.
The following nicely describes the overall importance of digital dexterity—and what it means—for students in modern learning environments:
Today, if students cannot write on the screen—if they cannot design, author, analyze, and interpret material on the Web and in other digital environments—they may be incapable of functioning effectively as literate citizens in a growing number of social spheres. The ability to write well—and to write well with computers and within digital environments—we believe will continue to play an increasingly important role in determining if students will be able to participate and succeed in school, work, and community.
(Hawisher, Selfe, Moraski, & Pearson 642-643)
Being a student in the twenty-first century also means being able to effectively navigate the plethora of online tools and resources for academic success, on a basic level. Typing, printing, saving, editing—these are all things now accomplished on computers and absolutely necessary tasks for the university student. “Because many basic writers are also unfamiliar with the expectations and conventions of academic discourse, many students struggle to do both at the same time” (Patterson: Introduction).
Rebecca W. Black examines the website Fanfiction.net as a case study in which she examines the feedback and digital literacy of several writers, including self-acknowledged ELL (English Language Learner) writers. Despite the traditional and very real learning curve with language, particularly writing, Black demonstrates the many assets and tools that are being utilized by online-writers: reviews, co-writers, fan fiction consultants, spellcheckers, thesauruses, and writing help sites, to name a few.
“[I]n terms of literacy education, Fanfiction.net could provide one example for a classroom learning environment where the emphasis[…] is instead moving towards procedural knowledge that involved the acquisition of skills and strategies for how to learn and continue learning (Lankshear and Knobel 2003).”
Black contrasts this procedural knowledge with propositional knowledge, “knowledge that primarily involves the learning of content area facts and figures.” Her examples in the chapter include fans of a website author providing feedback about how to improve the author’s writing, even rewriting specific sections or explaining a grammar problem they observed while reading. The fact that, when given the digital, virtual space, peers become reviewers, even when unasked, shows that online writing can still be critical, informed, and intelligent. Given such a space, students in writing courses at the university level could add new procedural knowledge about writing to their repertoire. “This procedural knowledge, also known as […] the ‘ability to be a lifelong learner’ and learning in social contexts’ (Labbo, Reinking, and McKenna 1998) […] is also identified as a key aspect of being digitally literate in a society where resources are increasingly dispersed across computer and internet networks” (Black 133). A writing course in which no online resources are utilized is quickly becoming antiquated. Digital dexterity is a basic prerequisite in many fields. Students’ use of online activities can be employed as an avenue to both improve their writing skills and provide them with the essential, transferrable digital skills to keep them engaged as lifelong learners and critical thinkers.
In Gillespie’s sophomore literature course at Marquette University, her use of a collaborative e-journal (discussion board) was remarkably successful in making writing (and reading) feel like less for for both writers—students—and graders, Gillespie herself as the course instructor. “I couldn’t have predicted it, but the electronic journal turned out to be the centerpiece of the course, the one element that, more than any other, really moved students ahead, that facilitated their learning about literature and about writing about literature” (Gillespie 222). Despite her initial resistance to the medium, Gillespie quickly recognized the potency of the digital discussion board and journal, especially for her more reticent students. “My initial goal for the e-journal was to have the students learn from one another” (Gillespie 222). The format also would foster individual critical thought. This respect for the ability of students’ reasoning abilities, philosophically, sets the stage for more meaningful student-teacher interactions.
The true effects of this technique can be best appreciated by how the students’ writing and interactions changed over time. In the beginning, “the students were acutely aware of their peers and me [the teacher] as they freewrote. When they started, they used a stilted mini-essay approach” (Gillespie 224). However, this tense writing style, one that was heavily cognizant of the teacher-student hierarchies at play, began to break down within this digital space. They started using “free-and easy slang and bantered briefly.” This is not the only noteworthy change though. As the students abandoned the stuffy, academic jargon they were usually constrained by, their student voices actually became more elegant and structured. “Students often started by specifying which part of the prompt they were responding to.” 3 Reframed, we can interpret this as the students’ recognition, through practice, of the importance of providing contextual information in their writing.
In addition to organizing their responses more skillfully, they were taking bigger, bolder chances when it came to their own posts and in their feedback to other writers. “Being able to speak in their student voices helped them relax with one another and risk alternative interpretations” (Gillespie 225). This is not just true of students’ own posts and textual interpretations. Through the interactive, dialogic nature of the journal, students’ readings and responses were definitely influenced by the writings of classmates. 4 Eventually, even students who at first were uncomfortable disagreeing with others were able to make academically-logical arguments against their fellows in a confident, well-supported manner (Gillespie 226).
Most intriguing of all, however, is the fact that this writing-intensive course, in the end, felt like much less work to Gillespie and to the students. Why? There are a number of reasons for this. Primary among them is the dialogic style of the feedback students are given. Writers receive peer-to-peer responses as well as teacher responses. Both are dialogues, but the former is more interactive, natural, and less formal—and therefore, less intimidating. The multiplicity of feedback doesn’t feel “scholastic,” but rather, like a conversation.
Secondly, this feedback between peers is instantaneous. Instead of writing and waiting and wondering what the response of just the teacher is, students are able to get a variety of reactions very quickly. This, again, has the characteristics of a conversation, rather than a top-down hierarchical situation between an instructor and the powerless student just receiving that criticism. “Students comment on one another’s posts. I don’t [necessarily] have to,” explains Gillespie. “When I do send written feedback to an individual, it […] doesn’t require class time to hand out” (Gillespie 229). Not only does this help build relationships, but it also saves the instructor class time for more important tasks, instead of spending time on simple, clerical tasks.
The timeline Gillespie used for the writing also made it easier for her and the students. The responses were due by midnight on Thursday and she posted the topics the previous Friday. Entries generally began appearing by Sunday. This more relaxed timeline allowed the posts and comments to come in over the course of a week. “Since the entries were coming to me over the course of the week, I would find them easier to read than a stack of paper journal entries” (Gillespie 223-224) which all get turned in at the same time. The dialogic style of the journal and this timing decision allowed student ideas to percolate and blend, making them more nuanced and specific. The blog also helped everyone to stay in the loop. By the time Friday’s class came, the students had already had thorough interaction with the text(s) and formulated a variety of readings on their own and in conjunction with fellow students. 5
Lastly, the online format of the writing facilitated the writing to learn concept while exposing them to how other students write to learn. “[A student] used an informal student voice, but was doing serious text-searching and analysis of narrative structures, the sort of work that would normally appear in a formal paper, but that students would never get to see from their peers […] Students were not required to take the journal to these lengths, but many did, outstripping my simple goals for the engineers who might hate novels” (Gillespie 228). If teachers are able to set up and construct the environments for peer-to-peer interaction on course-content, they will often be impressed with the caliber of thinking going on, even though that thinking is happening in casual diction and a casual format.
By providing students with low-stakes assignments in a journaling format, teachers can give students an invaluable resource for their longer assignments and cultivate their creativity in a searchable, editor-free format.
Journaling, as supported by Peter Elbow’s work, has inherent value in its ability to allow students to reach conclusions they could not have otherwise arrived at. Writing out their thoughts is the most tactile interaction they will have with their own thoughts. A fellow student and I have put together a prototype of a program that could be adapted for many different courses and platforms. It is a way to enforce freewriting for students online. Students would be given a prompt (online) and enter their journal. A timer begins, which can be set to any length of time, though ten to twenty minutes is probably sufficient. Within the given period, students “must” produce a predetermined minimum word count; this does not need to be very high, but is just meant as an instigator for students who may be more hesitant at first. Most important, though, are the prototype’s limitations: no backspacing, no highlighting, no cutting, and no pasting. 6 It would also be very simple to write a test that, even if the previously listed restrictions were bypassed, would be able to detect when a student adds a lot of text all at once (i.e., they found a way to paste in their response, instead of freewriting online). Though this will likely make students uncomfortable at first, the importance of ignoring the backspace key—the externalization of our internal editor—is crucial for helping students lose their inhibitions when writing.
The journaling concept forces students to get something down, even if for a particular week it isn’t very substantial, and maintains a collection of their thoughts online. After the timer is up, the journal entry could be saved to a private folder for the students’ perusal; once the timer is up and the entry is saved here, the student can now copy and paste the entry into a word processor if they like. This would be an invaluable resource to students when it came time to work on their drafts of longer, structured assignments, like essays. The journals would, at that point, become a searchable collection of their past thoughts and emotions—the perfect beginnings of a nuanced, original essay. 7
By making the journal a non-graded—or at least only graded for participation—requirement, the fear and anxiety many students experience dissipates; writing without fear of receiving a poor grade on an assignment increases student creativity. Nicole Hancock, an instructor in basic writing at a community college in Illinois, decided to use Blackboard (a learning management system service) to host student online journaling in her course, explicitly to support low-stakes writing. “This allows them to get used to writing electronically without serious repercussions at first […] Eventually, students attach documents and interact online using the discussion board” (Patterson: Hancock). The online journal format helps cultivate digital dexterity while getting students to do the difficult, critical thinking part of writing in a relatively risk-free environment that feels private.
Nicole Hancock’s work with her community college students via Blackboard went beyond the previous examples of online journaling. Surprisingly, Hancock explains some of the serious drawbacks to the traditional hard-copy style of writing and grading. “In past semesters, I asked students to purchase a one-subject notebook for their reflective writing assignments. Countless students left them at home, had to staple various bits of writing into the notebook, or lost the notebook. The same students used computers as typewriters, merely typing their work and printing it without saving it in a way that could be retrieved later” (Patterson: Hancock). This was especially damaging when it came time for students to revise, since they had no saved versions of their writing anywhere or had lost the notebook with good ideas. As an instructor, Hancock was, in the print world, powerless to prevent all of this from happening. Thus, she decided to experiment with moving the journals, paper drafts, and feedback online.
Blackboard was a platform students were already using for some of their other courses—thus, there wasn’t new information (password, login) to remember or additional work or set up required to begin using it. Hancock put electronic, downloadable versions of all the course materials online for students who misplaced the hard copies. By saving their drafts online, students couldn’t lose or misplace them or their journals. “This helps them to keep track of a variety of drafts without saving over their old work. These emerging writers learn the value of copying and pasting their previous drafts into a new space to revise […] the old drafts are then available at the end of the semester when students need to see how their work has evolved” (Patterson: Hancock). By making it easier for students to browse through their old work, they are fully equipped to succeed. Self-reflection on their work increases their awareness of their personal development of ideas, writing style and their evolution as writers. It also gives them a new, visual appreciation for the process of multi-drafting.
Additionally, the online drafts carry the comments and feedback from the instructor (Hancock). This makes it impossible to lose the notes the students will need to look over when writing their new drafts. “…[S]tudents have my comments on their work saved. This allows them to look back on all those comments at the end of the semester (comments that were often lost when the graded paper was misplaced) and continue to revise and reflect accordingly” (Patterson: Hancock). This could even be modified, if the instructor desired, to be an option for peer-revisions. Losing important feedback is one of the most frustrating situations for writers. Removing this obstacle only improves the process and, therefore, student productivity.
Online writing engages students by using a medium they are familiar with as the backdrop for their academic work. However, solely changing the format of a course will not necessarily make students suddenly care more about the class. The content must also be modified to pique students’ interest. Amy Patterson is an instructor at a two-year technical college in Wisconsin. She has realized the advantage of bringing students’ extracurricular experiences into the classroom:
My students appreciate assignments with real world implications. “Students often sense that multimodal approaches to composing will matter in their lives outside the classroom” (Takayoshi & Selfe, 2007, p.4), and digital storytelling provides an outlet for students to improve their composing skills and “create a place for themselves and their own history in the curriculum” (Murie, Collins, and Detzner, 2004, p.74).
(Patterson: Patterson)
Often, students can feel ostracized from more traditional, formalized academic work and rhetoric because they have difficulty connecting with this language that is so disconnected from their daily lives or lived experiences. In Patterson’s case specifically, students were writing their own literacy narratives in a multimedia project. Not only does such an assignment “allow students to use technology to explore and further understand their different selves: academic, social, and personal” but also “confers[s] upon students the relevance of personal experience” (Patterson: Patterson). By giving them the opportunity to include their own exterior knowledges—which they previously may have considered “inferior knowledges”—inside the classroom, you as the instructor validate these experiences as potential battlegrounds for rigorous academic work and critical thinking. Making the content of your course relevant will garner more engaged student responses and, most likely, higher quality products, since the students are more likely to emotionally and intellectually invest in the coursework.
Choosing to take up one or all of these steps can help your students develop as writers, improve their skills, and help them redefine themselves as critical thinkers, lifelong learners, and powerful citizens.
Black, Rebecca W. “Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction.” A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: P. Lang, 2007. Print.
Campbell, Angus, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E. Miller. The Voter Decides. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1954. Print.
Chambers, Tamela N. “Reap, Write and Rap: Connecting Teens and Tweens to Poetry through Hip-Hop.” Thinking Outside the Book: Essays for Innovative Librarians. Ed. Carol Smallwood. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2008. 123-25. Print.
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Gee, J. 2001. “Identity as an analytic lens for research in education” In W. G. Secada (Ed.) Review of Research in Education. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association. 99-126.
Gillespie, Paula. “E-Journals: Writing to Learn in the Literature Classroom.” Chapter 17 from: Reiss, Donna, and Dickie Selfe and Art Young. Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Digitized by the Colorado State University Libraries, 2008. E-book. Pages 221-230.
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