A Transitional Train Ride

Teacher, Researcher, Scholar, Essayist: A Web Text with Some Assembly Required

A cheat sheet.

Here's a copy of all the snippets together.

Transitional Train Ride – The View Out the Window

Journal entry for April 14, 2006: I just read the student evaluations for the 308j winter quarter technology and writing class. I so not believe I have ever had lower marks. Enough students sympathized with what I was trying to do to – around three – to support the argument that I was perhaps more disliked than inept. At least three students mentioned positive aspects of the class discussions. Concerning the majority opinion, one student claimed that I lied to her (most probably a misunderstanding.) A couple claimed that I yelled at them during class discussion (this may in fact have been the case – I do not usually make students feel this way.) Many, close to half – probably equals around eight – strongly disagreed with the statement that the instructor was satisfactory. When I saw the checked box ‘somewhat disagreed’ that the instructor was satisfactory, I almost began to feel all warm and fuzzy. Bucking this trend, one fan claimed that I was among the best teachers he ever had.

Last winter quarter, John and I developed a group writing assignment based on students using a pbwiki (“Make a free, password-protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich”) as an environment for collaboration. We both taught junior level composition classes (Rhetoric and Writing II), based on technology, using Vitanaza’s abridged CyberReader. I taught my class in a computer classroom, John did not. The project was carefully designed in such a way that students would work on it for about an hour or two per week during the quarter. The final project would be turned in during exams week and count towards their grades. In addition to collaborating on various components of the writing project, which consisted of a critical introduction to a pop-culture phenomenon and a short annotated review of links related to that topic, students were also required to perform peer critiques in the wiki medium and on the MOO.

I had a neat plan on the syllabus, but because this course was so radically different from anything I have ever done, my ability to read my own performance in the classroom and adjust accordingly was weakened beyond anything I had heretofore experienced. I think maybe this was because this class occurred the first quarter after the comprehensive exams were over, and I went a little overboard with my new found sense of freedom. I was so exited about being able to step outside of my do-what-works-best-with-the-least-amount-of-energy-mindset that I blew up my entire junior composition class in a fit of technological enthusiasm and dove right into the deep end of technologically inspired pedagogy, with predictable results. And yet this has not really discouraged me from wanting to explore the use of computer technology in my writing classroom. So this was one class of eighteen students who didn’t ‘get me.” So what?

We were interested in the intersections between individual and group writing and the technologies that students employ individually (e.g. Word) and as part of a group (MOOs and wikis).

Let’s start with a few student quotes you might expect from a class that incorporates unfamiliar technologies:

“Computer technology might have hindered the project, because not everyone was as computer literate as [everyone else].”

“Technology helped the project. . .but in a way I think it hindered us because it was something new to us and was confusing to work at first.”

“I guess the only troubling part, if I hand to choose one, would be the learning of the new technology that we used in the process of writing the paper.”

The most encouraging response was:

“The most satisfying part of this group project was being able to learn a new technique of writing [. . .] the most difficult task associated with the paper was [learning to use the technology]. This took time and was at first confusing to group members. Though once this was mastered, it make the writing process easier and more accessible.”

This presents a more complete picture of instruction with new technology . . . as a learning curve or a process, rather than a static image. This student did not shut down in reaction to the new environment.

I think I began to have some intuition concerning part of what might be wrong after the first day of rough draft critique for paper number one. During this class which occurred in the third week out of a ten week quarter, two or three students read rough drafts out loud and I lead a class exploration of the merits of the drafts. What I began to notice halfway through this part of the class was that many students were surprised by something. Upon reflection I have decided it was my confidence and sense of authority. They looked at me, and they listed to me differently that day.

One of our guiding questions was concerned with how a group writing project intersects with personal writing or if students are conscious of how it might. Based on Vielstimmig’s interesting conceptualization of collaboration, in “Petals on a Wet Black Bough,” (2 writers with a single, although polyvocal, persona that integrates other voices, as well), the wiki seems to offer a site for a different kind of collaboration than we are accustomed to.

We read and talked about Vielstimmig as a class and practiced the ‘New Essay’ as a style in our individual papers (an ironic categorization considering Vielstimmig’s argument). While Vielstimmig called for new essay that exposed the fissures and gaps in the presentation of the illusion of a single author, students, when given the opportunity to make their own stylistic decisions, still attempted a unified voice. They write, “the wiki truly facilitated a paper written by a group that appeared to be written by one individual.”

On Friday, at my weekly meeting with Paul, I told him about rough draft day and started wondering aloud, “Could it be that I have encouraged my students to see me as a well meaning techno-enthusiast who doesn’t really know very much? Could the peer critique have been the first moment that my students saw me as knowledgeable in any useful way? Have I actually convinced my students to see me as incompetent?” These thoughts astonished me, and I am still not sure to what extent they are true, but in terms of how I tell this story, how I attempt to understand what went wrong in this class, they are central.

Students are concerned with the differences of interaction among virtual and physical bodies. This binary surfaced both in terms of using the MOO and using the wiki for group work. Once again the issues here are related to how technology changes our interface with education and with each other. At first, students may feel that virtual meeting are either merely neat, “I thought it was really cool and innovative that we could be in a ‘classroom’ while not physically in one,” or feel that it is counter productive, “I think [the wiki] allowed us to more easily avoid actual contact with one another. I think we would have performed better as a group if we were creating a paper in a more conventional way,” or “I didn’t like not talking at first.”

I think when I wrote this prompt I was trying to provide an opportunity for students to express polite generalities that I would probably ignore. And to a limited extent I got this – the engineers liked the use of technology, the early education majors liked the group work – but I also succeeded in encouraging some very blunt criticism in language that felt like it was addressed to a peer on AIM and not to the instructor at the head of the class.

“The MOO was not worthwhile and did not contribute to my learning or writing in any way.”

“Nobody enjoyed the group project and the MOO just confused everyone.”

I would not want to deny my students the right to feel this way, and to express their feelings, but I can not help feeling that I missed an important rhetorical lesson concerning how we express ourselves differently when using different writing technologies. This type of expression is well within the acceptable range of discourse in a fast paced Moo or Chat Room environment, but when a teacher collects handwritten responses and leisurely reads them in his office, the impact of such blunt language can be somewhat more intense.

I sometimes run into teachers that mention they’ve used the MOO in class and never will again. Upon further pressing, they usually admit that their use of the MOO was restricted to one session that may or may not even have lasted an entire class meeting. In such cases, I guess they’re right to challenge the usefulness of a MOO. MOOs become pedagogically useful over time and with routine use. A student in my class put it this way: “at first I was a little hesitant about the different technologies that we were using in this class [. . . but] the MOO, for instance, really began to grow on me.” With time and repeated use, students and teachers get their bearing and figure out how to get more out of the experience.

My sense of confidence in my teaching abilities has been reinforced through many years of teaching and negotiating my authority in a traditional classroom. I do not believe that I need a strong sense of classroom authority in order to be confident in front of a group of students. However this first large experiment on techno-pedagogy came with an ironic twist. I thought I was going to observe student perceptions of how they write differently in different writing environments using different writing technologies. I ended up being astonished by how completely different writing technologies challenged my own sense of authority and confidence as a teacher. This dramatic turn about feels illuminating in a number of ways.

As a teacher experienced in using various technologies for instruction, I, frankly, was surprised at some of the positive student responses towards the wiki as a means for collaboration. In my experience, the most compelling lessons we learn from the use of technology are ones that we are pulled through kicking and screaming. I find a lack of serious resistance suspicious in this case.

Many of us enter into the discussion concerning technology and pedagogy from different doorways. I would not describe myself as a technology enthusiast, although I am very interested in playing with the equipment and the ideas, and I have a deep interest in what we do in our writing classrooms as we attempt to connect with our students. For me the intersection between technology and pedagogy highlights what is most exciting, energizing, and sexy about the writing classroom.

The wiki can be used as a leveling tool. In fact, is seems that it was designed that way as a medium. When any writer within a group has equal access (although, this is only a possibility) to a document, something changes. That semblance of the single document and imagined single author might still be there if the document looks like a traditional print essay. But, an author’s relation to the text is different in terms of the control one has over it in terms of the choices made and lack of control in terms of the choices the next author makes.