Response Paper - Class 3 - T/Th

My responses are in italics.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Class 3 Discussion Questions (Dawn & Kristen) + one new question about collaboration

In addition to mine and Kristen’s other questions, I'd like us to consider how a text is collaboratively authored.

• Does anyone see a difference between jointly authoring a single document and supplementing a document through comments and discussion and updates?

I think the difference has to do with time. Think of a timeline, where zero represents the creation of a work. On the left side of zero is development time (a private zone, even if the work is undertaken in partnership) . On the right side of zero is evaluation time, where the work exists a priori and anyone can look at it or comment upon it (a public zone).

If there is no intention to create a work, then there is no development time. Then you are just in a conversation, as we are here.

An analogy: in film-making, you have pre-production, production, and post – all of these phases, though, have to do with the original “birthing” of the film, or development. This is the process that I see as the same as being in partnership to write a document. Now the film has been released, and so further commenting and discussion that happens after the fact is qualitatively different – it does not affect the creation of the original piece.

There is a difference between creating a new work, either singly or in partnership or as a collaborative group, and annotating finished products.

In our previous class, Kristen pointed out the importance of collaborative online writing at work.

• But what are the social conventions of e-collaboration?

See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-supported_collaboration

Requires protocols

Communication essential to the collaboration, or disruptive of it, is studied in CSC proper. It is somehow hard to find or draw a line between a well-defined process and general human communications.

Reflecting desired organization protocols and business processes and governance norms directly, so that regulated communication (the collaboration) can be told apart from free-form interactions, is important to collaboration research, if only to know where to stop the study of work and start the study of people. The subfield CMC or computer-mediated communicationdeals with human relationships.

Here are my thoughts about these questions, in italics:

• Are there rules to this we can teach and/or that we must follow? These conventions are being developed now, and that is what is exciting about participating in this technological time of change.
• Are we really free to overwrite someone else's work in our wiki? I think the more polite thing to do is to post serial discussions.
• Is there a leader in group composing? Who has the final authority? No one. It’s a group. Perhaps the loudest voice, or the most authoritative, wins.
• Who owns the intellectual property? Depends on the context. Will we have to sign IP agreements before we begin?
• Can a ning be used as a collaborative writing tool? If so, how? I am not sure. I think there is something very different about socializing on the web, or creating a context for group inquiry, and actually writing.

I like the Wikipedia background on Ning, by the way.

Here are our previous discussion questions:

1. New Media Rhetorics in the Attention of the Economy Discussion Questions My answers follow in italics, after the bullets.

• How much is too much? As teachers, teachers in training, and/or professionals -what is your take /reaction to the idea of information glut/information overload. (defined as: –noun Psychology. an excess of incoming information, as might confront a pedestrian on a crowded city street, that forces one to be selective in the information received and retained.) Do you see the onslaught and overabundance of information as being negative or positive to your classrooms and educational institutions?
• In this essay we see several examples of students using FLASH to convey a layered message of their choosing, including PR messages, poetry, music videos, and more. Does the use of animation, audio, and videos overpower, compliment, or enhance the written word? Do projects such as these have a place in typical English classrooms, should they?

I found the New Media Rhetorics piece to be maddening. The author uses a flash movie to discuss “multimodal composition.” In doing so, he circumvents interface design conventions for document processing. You cannot zoom, select, or cut and paste text for your own edification. You have to discover the page-curl in order to advance through the movie. Annotations and references are not hyper-linked. References even to illustrative demos are not linked – they are merely referred to.

In the end, none of the bells and whistles can compensate for efficiency. The noise to signal ratio in this piece was off, and the medium obscured the message.

2. "Where Ideas Are Garbage and All Writing is Free: Doubting and Believing in Freewriting”

Traditionally speaking, to my knowledge, freewriting is something done alone - one writer with one journal or one computer screen. However, it's now, supposedly, easy to 'freewrite' together or on a public forum.

• Elbow writes: "There is something about the [Feel of? Sound of? Smell of? You fill in the blank ______] pen on paper.” ...to which the authors respond: Yeah. You’re right. There is something about it. It’s slow. What is your reaction to this? Do you agree that writing with pen and paper is outdated and 'slow'?
• The authors 'freewrite' about the best resources to make freewriting a collaborative endeavor, mentioning googledocs, livejournal, and blogs. Therefore, it can be surmised that blogs are a form of freewriting. When this happens is freewriting still what we have always known it to be - a way to work through writers block...or does it become more? Can free writing truly be a shared public experience, as well as a private one?

This site reminded me of the Whole Earth Catalog, or other “home-made” literary magazines of the sixties. There is a reference to Marinetti, so I guess this is the point. I think you need to have a taste for collaborative free-writing; it’s a kind of genre, as exemplified by the lovely, textural herringbone patter underneath the left nav bar.

3. "Putting 2.0 and Two Together: What Web 2.0 Can Teach Composition About Collaborative Learning”

Dawn already mentioned one of things I am curious about...reactions to this: According to the ISTE 'students should be able to use technology to collaborate before they can even compose academic texts'.

Other questions to think about:

• Can students teach teachers to use new technology to support collaborative composition? I love the idea of students being the teachers. I love the idea of the student seizing authority. I am not sure, though, what kinds of literature will be made as a result of collaborative composition. Again, I think of the difference between the novelist and the film-maker. The novelist is of course a solo practitioner.
• What are your thoughts on versioning and coauthoring..is versioning a form of plagiarizing or is it a way to collaborate with people you may not otherwise have the ability to do so with? This is a slippery slope. I hope that all these tools make each of us more rigorous thinkers, less prone to plagiarizing and more apt to write as individuals.
• Everywhere you look these days, 'social communities' and advertising abound. Gerber writes "Though dropping the “friend” moniker, the more professional site LinkedIn refers to a user’s contacts in a network, and myriad commercial sites like Amazon lull users into a sense of security by referring to our 'fellow' customers who may be 'just like us'". How can educators tap into this idea of social communities in classrooms, without causing students to lose a sense of self?

I think that each student must assume a role, and be aware of the space between the authentic person underneath and the mask. The role can be very empowering. No matter what, each of us has to assume a new role of navigator, don’t we? Otherwise, how to we get through all this stuff? THIS IS SPARTA.

• Gerber, as well as Ellerston, both reference media and advertising in their articles. It's no secret that we live in an advertising run era - but what happens when we start bringing advertising principles and methods into classrooms? Are we prepping students to be 'drones' ruled by media and advertising, or are we preparing them for the world in which they and we live?

Another provocative question. Do you remember the Edison Project? Chris Whittle proposed putting closed-circuit TV’s with targeted advertising into classrooms in exchange for technology. There was an overwhelming response against this, as I remember. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Schools

But, advertising principles, as MK pointed out in class,, represent powerful ways to communicate. The best advertisements grab and hold attention. I think educators would be wise to harness these lessons and get students to be savvy deconstructivists themselves. If school were as exciting as going to the mall, maybe we would be in first place global academic rankings.

Please consider these quotes from Gerben’s "Putting 2.0 and Two Together:”and how it correlates to Ellertson’s "New Media Rhetorics in the Attention Economy" assertions below…

According to the The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), as reported in a featured front-page story in the Detroit Free Press, “technology-literate students should be able to “create media-rich presentations for other students on the appropriate and ethical use of digital tools and resources” by the time they graduate from high school. The same article recommends that children aged 4-8, in prekindergarten to second grade, should be able to “in a collaborative work group, use a variety of technologies to produce a digital presentation or product in a curriculum area.”

According to ISTE, students should be able to use technology to collaborate before they can even compose academic texts. (Gerben, 5)

Ellertson contends that those who control human attention have the power to control human behavior and that this translates into the power to control how and where viewers spend their resources—time and money. Therefore we must become interactive rhetoricians where “in addition to text and visual design, multimodal composing will come to mean programming interactive elements into the new media text, funneling information from a wide variety of sources and then presenting it with a series of techniques that construct a message by using media as syntactical elements.” (Ellertson, 15)

• Should educators incorporate digital technologies in order to develop technologically literate students? If so, how?

I don’t think there is a choice right now. But I wonder if the idea of creating technologically literate students is faulty. The students are citizens of the world. Won’t they bring their literacy into the classroom with them?

What role do you see professional development playing in developing technology-literate students?

Which academic department shoulders the responsibility?

All departments should shoulder the cost. I think it is kind of odd that just because the word “literacy” is used that the burden falls to language arts departments. Same below. All subjects are equally affected by the technology revolution, aren’t they?

Who pays for it?

And what happens in our disadvantaged public schools?

I think the issues are the same for all subjects in disadvantaged schools. To make better schools and better students, we must provide access, create high standards, and involve the community.