Resource Blog #3

My third resource is a book titled Good Faith Collaboration written by Joseph Reagle Jr. This book is more a philosophical and anthropological examination of the phenomenon of Wikipedia. The beginning chronicles the history of encyclopedias and of Wikipedia. Then, Reagle moves on to more of a reflection on the spirit and ethics of the Wikipedia community. The Wikipedia community is something of a surprise and seems to contradict the popular notion that people are inherently mean and nasty on the internet. The Wikipedia community is usually calm, collected, and civil with each other. This book made me think through some of the reasons why writing for Wikipedia could be academic in a sense. The Wikipedia community is quite demanding but it is also quite polite.

Resource Blog #2

For my presentation, I used a book titled How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It, written by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. This book was used for it highly specific advice on how to navigate Wikipedia. It covers a range of issues from how to write an article, what makes a good article, resolving disputes, how to ban or block a fellow Wikipedian, etc. I used the book to capture a nuanced understanding of what assigning students to write for Wikipedia would look like. There is even a chapter on Wikipedia for teachers as well as many chapters on Wikipedia’s sister projects.

Plagiarism

I’m not quite sure if plagiarism is skyrocketing due to the internet as it is so claimed in the major media outlets. But if it is, then I think that composition instructors should fight fire with fire. In Chapter 15, Intellectual Property: Plagiarism, Copyright, and Trust, Professor James Purdy is quoted as saying the following: “If plagiarism is easier to commit because of the internet, it is also easier to catch because of the internet.” This is important to consider to all of the old-school composition teachers who lament how the internet has been used as a source of plagiarism. Composition instructors can use that same resource, the internet, to catch plagiarism. Turnitin.com has written a plagiarism study that every instructor should probably read. In the study, it mentions the most common sources where students go to plagiarize is not academic paper sites but user-generated websites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers. And legitimate educational sites are used more frequently than cheat sites. It is important to keep this in mind when teaching. The study also found that educational institutions that use turnitin.com have reported a drop in plagiarism.

There are also some built-in strategies that composition instructors can use to discover plagiarism. The chapter “noted that the frequent interaction between instructors and students creates an environment that obstructs plagiarism.” Also, “because of frequently reading student responses throughout the semester, any written reports or essays should not come as a surprise in terms of credibility and authenticity.” So, basically, being an engaged instructor who has a hand-on approach should do much to prevent and catch plagiarism. I feel that students should understand the nuances of evaluating and citing sources in the digital age, especially in online classes.

Teaching Online Courses

Scott Warnock, in Teaching Writing Online: How and Why, lays out guidelines on how to teach an online course or hybrid course for composition teachers. In his introduction, he briefly mentions that if compositionists do not get onboard with teaching online then forces outside their control will adapt online courses to the detriment of composition and the career of composition teachers. He mentions this in passing. I would like to know more about what he feels about this. I would like to know more about how compositionists can influence larger administrative decisions like how to implement online classes. In a recent New York Times article,, Trip Gabriel notes the increase in businesses offering educational classes online to schools. School administrators see these online courses as a way to save money since they don’t have to pay a teacher even though there are questions about the quality of education these students get. What I’m interested as a future composition teacher is how do I advocate for the use of online classes that are run from trained professionals in composition and not make sure that online classes get out of our control and are used by administrators as a way to cut costs. I understand the importance of online classes for students who are very busy and do not have the time to take a traditional face to face class. I also understand that in many ways an online class is good pedagogically since all communication between students and teachers and students and students are done with written texts. Thus, increasing opportunities to write means more learning opportunities. But I also understand the motives of some administrators to cut costs by outsourcing composition to companies. And in the dire budget times we live in, this is a significant threat to the quality of education as well as to compositionists themselves.

Resource

I’m doing my research paper on wikis and wikipedia. I want to focus on how writing for wikis in composition helps understand composition theory in a new light. Specifically, so far I have Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” article and McCormick’s socio-cultural model of reading used in her book The Culture of Reading and The Teaching of English to shed light on writing for Wikipedia. I draw heavily from Robert E. Cumming’s book Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia, which won the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for 2009. Cummings lays out a theoretical argument for why composition teachers should assign students to write for Wikipedia as well as a chapter on the actual assignment details.

Composition w/ New Media for the 21st Century Workforce

“When today’s students enter their post-education professional lives, odds are pretty good that they will be asked to work with others from around the globe collaboratively to create content for diverse and wide-ranging audiences. Compare that to an educational system that, by and large, asks those same students to work independently for a very narrow audience (usually the teacher who gives the grade), and the disconnect becomes painfully clear.” -Will Richardson, Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, Chap. 9, pg. 130

There are many reasons students come to the university to get a college degree. One reason is for personal enrichment, the quest to sharpen the mind and become a well-rounded person. Another important factor (some say the most important) is the greater job prospects open to students once they get a college degree. For my first blog post, I would like to focus on the latter and not the former. Teaching students how to write via new media is relatively new in the discipline of composition. I would like to focus on the benefits of teaching digital writing as opposed to traditional writing and how that relates to the workforce shaped by the twin forces of technology and globalization. Teaching writing through blogs and wikis prepares today’s student for the sort of jobs available in the 21st century.
When we ask students to write using blogs, we are asking them to engage in writing called connective writing, “a form that forces those who do it to read carefully and critically, that demands clarity and cogency in its construction, that is done for a wide audience, and that links to the sources of the ideas expressed.” (Richardson, 28) This is a new genre of writing in which there are many advantages to using in the composition classroom. As we discussed in class this semester, students take writing for blogs more seriously than writing for just a professor in the traditional sense. When students take writing more seriously and they devote more time to writing, obviously, their communication skills increase in a world where the skill of communication is valued more than ever in the workforce. The ability to write clearly and powerfully increases job prospects for students in a world where routine activities have now been taken over by machines. According to the Rand Corporation, a think-tank focused on global issues, technology will be responsible for low-skilled jobs traditionally worked by low-skill workers (Rand, 128).
But that is not the only benefit of writing with blogs. Blog writing require student to learn how to manage the information age and learn how to be critical of online sources. When students learn how to navigate the read/write web, they are learning how to become a lifelong learner since once students graduate, they will not usually have access to university-related sources of information once they graduate. Students in the workforce will be learning from sources online. And as the position paper issued by the Rand Corporation shows, employers are now looking for workers who are lifelong learners as opposed to the workers who do most of there learning in the university before their entry into the workforce (Rand, 128). Because the pace of technological change in the economy is so fast, employers need lifelong learners in the workforce. Workers in the future economy will rely more and more on new media trainings for professional development. A knowledge of how to use a computer and blogs surely will only help employees in the future. Also, more and more employers report that they require their employees to use a personal computer at work, expecting new graduates to know how to use a computer and use the internet (Rand, 136). Using blogs in composition allows students to become familiar with a computer and the read/write web if they are not already familiar with it. And last but not least, wikis require students to learn how to collaborate with information and other people. This is an extremely important skill in the 21st century workforce (Rand, 249).
Blogs and wikis are new instrumental teaching tools for the 21st century. Though I did not focus on the writing aspect of blogs and wikis in this post, I wanted to point out the aspects of blogs and wikis that were not so obvious for the new globalized economy.