6.23.14: Pedagogical Tool Review – Paradigm Online Writing Assistant: www.powa.org

6.23.14: Pedagogical Tool Review – Paradigm Online Writing Assistant: www.powa.org

Introduction to Pedagogical Tool Review:

          As both the popularity and availability of distance education continues to rise, it’s imperative that writing instructors keep an eye on both extant and emerging pedagogical tools so we can provide students with the most effective options for learning writing in our contemporary, technologically-driven world. And there are, arguably, few other disciplines that are as impacted by online learning technology as much as writing. Indeed, in their text, Writing across the Disciplines, Joyce Neff and Carl Whithaus argue that “the ability to write well has never been more important. In today’s technology-driven economy, more people than ever before are required to use the written word…businesses want employees who can write, and colleges want to graduate students who can write” (126-7). It is with this exigence in mind, then, that I reviewed the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant website, (found at www.powa.org).

          Paradigm Online Writing Assistant was created by Chuck Guilford, an emeritus English professor at Boise State University. He has thirty years’ experience teaching English composition, creative writing, and literature at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Further, he’s a longtime member in the N.C.T.E. as well as the 4C’s. I think that these foundational criteria are certainly important, and arguably necessary, for creating an online, English pedagogical writing tool. Neff and Whithaus agree that “faculty involvement with distance and distributed learning technologies needs to occur in the development of these technologies” (17). Thus, based upon Guilford’s rather impressive educational and professional background, I reserved high expectations for the website he created to help teach writing online.

What is Paradigm Online Writing Assistant?

          According to Guilford’s companion text publisher, Paradigm Online Writing Assistant offers strategies for mastering the writing process. It includes help with discovering, organizing, revising, and editing writing. It also has chapters on thesis/support, essays, informal essays, exploratory essays and argumentative essays. In addition, the book offers a clear, concise discussion of how to use MLA documentation. (Wordcurrent Press 1)

How the site provides online writing instruction:

          The site offers the user an intuitive, logical, easy-to-navigate platform. The main writing topics are listed across the top of the screen, oriented from left-to-right, in a scaffolded-learning order. Within each of these topics are several subtopics relating to that given writing stage. The topics are arranged as follows, and a brief description of some of the contents and features are also provided below:

·         Invent

o   covers selecting a topic, free-writing, using the “journalist questions,” dramatism (as championed by Kenneth Burke), and tagmemics. Within this topic, the student is guided through the initial planning phases of beginning a writing project and can be quite useful

·         Arrange

o   involves lessons and activities designed to help flesh out the selected topic. It includes activities for mind-mapping, networking, and developing paragraph order.

·         Revise

o   covers topics such as audience, writer’s voice, writing with precision and word choice

·         Edit

o   gives specific warning about reliance on word processing spell-checkers – certainly a useful recommendation for developing writers

·         Reflect

o   contains subtopics on making the writing project more interesting, such as using metaphorical language and developing strong openings and closings

·         Explain

o   deals primarily with the thesis. As the thesis is an essential component in academic writing, they are explained in full detail here. It offers lessons for how to create, reinforce, restate and/or summarize a thesis.

·         Convince  

o   provides informative lessons about developing arguments. It covers Aristotelian appeals, audience, persuasion tactics and even provides definitions and models of classical rhetorical forms for structuring an argument

·         Explore

o   specifically addresses exploratory essay creation. It provides lessons and activities for topic immersion and interaction, discusses the learning cycle (based on the work of Jean Piaget), as well as tips for revising the writing project for the reader, and lastly – introduces a more formal peer review activity

·         Document

o   provides informational lessons and activities related to creating a works cited/bibliography, hot to use parenthetical citations, how to provide proper documentation, what should be cited, and teaches the writer ten standard M.L.A. citational formats.

          These lessons and activities are easily accessed, written for the developmental writer, and I believe, do provide solid foundational information for creating a writing project.

Concerns about Paradigm Online Writing Assistant:

          The first issue I encountered with the site was the inability to actually register for an account. I tried logging in on several different browsers, which didn’t seem to help. I then tried to login with my Facebook account. Alas, also to no avail. Lastly, I sent a message to Paradigm via their Facebook group, explained my dilemma, and still have not yet heard back from anyone. Without a registered account, all of the content above is still available, but one cannot participate more actively in the “community” on the site. Without registration, a profile cannot be created, groups can’t be joined or created, and there is no ability to engage with videos, etc. However, even without an account, much of the site’s content is still available for use.

          The “community” at Paradigm Online Writing Assistant’s website leaves much to be desired. To begin with, the “my blog” page is inundated with advertisements for myriad pay-day advance type of loans. Further, there was not only a distinct lack of students’ writing under “my blogs,” but in fact, the space has been fully colonized by lending institutions, hot tub dealers, and other assorted vendors hawking their wares. Yet, when I clicked on “all blogs,” I did find actual entries. But, from the few posts that I read, it was apparent that the participants are at the developmental writing stage and their entries didn’t appear to directly engage with any of the lessons or activities that the site offers. Indeed, some were Twitter length opinions, others provided short, underdeveloped paragraphs. I was a bit disappointed, because I was hoping to see more engaged writing going on and I had certainly hoped there would have been commentary, peer review, and/or discourse taking place between the blog participants, and there just didn’t appear to be any interaction between the bloggers. It was as if the blogs posts were simply made, submitted, and seemingly abandoned. Finally, there was also a distinct lack of any instructor/facilitator/guidance presence, which is an additional concern. Like the blog features, it would appear that the website was created and then simply left to its own devices. Effective writing pedagogy demands the presence of an instructor/facilitator/guide, and www.powa.org failed to provide this essential component.

Conclusions:

          Therefore, while Paradigm Online Writing Assistant does have useful information, lessons, and activities for the developmental writer, the community if offers (or rather, lacks), falls very short and thus, strongly impacts my decision on whether I would personally utilize this site or not. I feel that it may be useful for providing information to developmental or beginning composition students who may need a bit more instruction on topic development, etc. However, there are other websites that can accomplish the same. It is my sense that a typical CMS would be able to provide and perform the informational tasks of www.powa.org, and would also be able to provide and foster a more genuine community of inquiry among the students/participants. 

          Ultimately, I think Guildford certainly had good intentions, and he did manage to create an efficient design, but the customization and/or interaction it lacks is seriously detrimental to its use value. We need learning systems that “balance the human and the technological,” (Neff and Whithaus 47), and I feel that Paradigm Online Writing Assistant only addresses the technological aspects. The human element of online writing instruction simply cannot be overlooked. It is with these factors in mind, then, that I hope to contribute this review to the continued development of online writing instruction technology. Indeed, as Neff and Whithaus so succinctly state, “poorly conceived technology is no better than a poorly written textbook” (22).

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Guilford, Chuck. Paradigm Online Writing Assistant. 2014. Website. Found at 

< http://www.powa.org/>.

Neff, Joyce and Carl Whithaus. Writing across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group. 2008.

Wordcurrent Press. 2014. Website. Found at <http://www.wordcurrent.com/paradigm.html>.

 

6.19.14: Community Analysis – Blogs: A Tale of Two Communities

6.19.14: Community Analysis – Blogs: A Tale of Two Communities

I. What is "community" to you?

          According to Dictionary.com, one definition of community is listed as: “a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists" (3). I think this definition is broadly similar to my sense of community. I think a community is created when a number of like-minded individuals come together in order to achieve a certain goal, or simply to share in, experience, and explore the nature/various aspects of that like-mindedness.

          Communities, in an online course, can certainly encompass these aspects, and much more. And while there’s been a great deal of scholarship written about DL communities, (Danowski, Boyd, Breuch, Colby, DePew, etc.), I think there’s an extant gap in that scholarship – one that investigates, what I have experienced to be,  two very different discursive communities that are created in the DL environment. Indeed, this course, I believe, has been a perfect example of these two different communities in action. Certainly, it can also be argued that are other subsets of community that can arise in both (more selective communities within these communities), but due to the limitations of this initial foray, I’ll discuss the two primary communities I’ve personally experienced in greater detail below. 

II. If we use blogs in our distance learning writing courses, will the interactivity they afford help to foster a community among students? 

          Blogs can provide a creative way to enhance learning and are an effective method for fostering a sense of community for students. In blogs, “students can practice invention skills, take risks and develop their own authoritative voices” and “as Susan McLeod points out, students can learn from each other in a more active way” (Warnock 70). Further, with the wide audience that blogs afford, students are not only exposed to a larger, more diverse audience, but they are thus also challenged to have greater plasticity of thought and experience the creation of more flexible, and precise, responses to the varied voices of the participants. Blogs, then, not only promote active learning for students, but also provide experience with interacting in a variety of different communities, in addition to the student/peer-based community of their DL course.

          Broadly, blogs aren’t too different from traditional CMS discussion boards, and perhaps they can be viewed as simply a more public form of the same, as both are foundationally a “post, response post” type of system. Traditional discussion boards, though, tend to foster a more insular sort of “community,” because they are typically closed-off to everyone but the students and the instructor, not so unlike some hermetically sealed classroom. Blogs, on the other hand, are generally produced for mass consumption in a more public forum and, thus, ultimately, engage with a wider community of participants which possess diverse backgrounds, cultural knowledges, literacies and values. So, while both traditional discussion boards and blogs have pros and cons, they are both valuable pedagogical tools for DL courses and inarguably have the ability to foster community.

III. Could the assignment have been designed in such a way as to better facilitate the goal of creating community? Try to go beyond, "the instructor could have required us to comment," as your only response. Had the instructor required comments would a community have actually resulted?

          I don’t feel that being “required to comment” would have better facilitated the creation of community in our course. Indeed, that sort of mandate can often elicit the more generalized, uninvolved, “just meeting the requirement” sort of responses, which has the potential to not only foreclose true learning, but also doesn’t contribute towards fostering a genuine sense of community amongst the participants. It becomes mere “busy work” or a “grind” to students who only seek to meet course requirements. Therefore the instructor’s guidelines for participation must be carefully created and monitored (Warnock).

          In our class, while I certainly had the motivation and the desire to engage with my blog community, the primary issue I personally encountered was, simply, a lack of time. This was an accelerated class (6 weeks), and while that makes it quite convenient, it also unfortunately creates an extraordinary crunch-for-time. I think, had this been a full-length semester (~ 16 weeks), I would have been enabled to engage more deeply, more frequently, and therefore, in a more communal manner. Yet, I still experienced a very supportive and engaging sense of community with my peers in this course.

          This, then, is what brings me to the exigence I see in the academic discourse about online community in DL courses. There appears to be two very distinct discursive communities that emerge in contemporary DL courses. As this current project is just an introductory investigation, I’ll just term them “academic-professional” and “academic-personal” for ease of use.

          The first of these, academic-professional, is the community which is formed in and focused primarily upon academic affairs, class assignments/performance, add activities. The discursive style tends toward a more discreet, monitored and controlled association(s) between the student, their peers, and the instructor. This community is one that nurtures the student’s academic-professional persona. It is generally academic in nature, engaged with the scholarly community on a more intellectual level, and is generally fostered through course required assignments and communications mediums such as discussion boards, synchronous meeting chat, peer reviews, blogs, wikis, etc.

          The second discursive community, the “academic-personal,” while also initially formed based upon, and typically often addresses academic issues, fosters a more personal level of engagement and interaction. The discourse is typically less formal, more “chat” or “text” –like, and is created and used primarily by the students, without an instructor present (also sometimes called “backchat”).This community is more relaxed, and while it sometimes addresses academic issues, it tends towards more a personal nature in the sharing and information exchange. It’s is a space where students feel safe to express a more genuine persona without regard to adhering to more formal, academic discursive style.

          Both of these communities are an important component of DL courses and in my personal experience, they are two distinct communities which support and encourage two very different aspects of being part of an academic community. And while the blogs tended to support the more academic-professional,  I personally found the academic-personal community more valuable in that it allows for the freedom to muse upon assignments, course progression, but perhaps more importantly, creates a discursive space in which we can support one another (academic or personal), provide advice, encouragement, or simply just to laugh. Academia can be an incredibly trying and stressful experience, especially at graduate level, and having a cohort of like-minded individuals who are with me both to assist in my academic-professional growth and provide a shoulder when needed to support my academic-personal needs, is truly the best of both worlds.

IV. Was there evidence of community in other aspects of the course, other than the blogs? What facilitated this? Why did it happen?

          As we touched upon in our class discussion, I believe the majority of our class felt a much higher and satisfying sense of community from our academic-personal community interactions. The blogs, being posted online and submitted for grading, created a more open, but more academic-professional space. Because of the public nature of this arena, we’re certainly more selective and cautious in our rhetoric and mostly strive to maintain a more academic persona, as these words are subject to public, as well as scholarly, opinion. The academic-personal group we created, however, allowed us to engage one another in a more personal manner. We would discuss individual life issues, academic anxieties, share general comments (both related to the course and not) and perhaps most importantly, we openly supported and encouraged one another. It gave us a support system that the public blog/discourse community could not provide.

          And while Danowski, Boyd, and others have noted, “interactions with instructor and peers are crucial (Boyd 3) for success” in online courses, there’s an important distinction that arises when we incorporate the notions of community into the instructor/student framework because, as noted, the two discursive communities and the interactions they foster, serve different functions. The instructor presence is indeed necessary in the academic-professional community. This has been proven time and again, and I certainly do not disagree. However, an instructor presence in an academic-personal community (with arguable exceptions, of course), would generally change the dynamic of that community and, it is my sense, would be counter-intuitive to the community-building that is needed “outside” of class for the DL student. Indeed, in the transcripts below, it is quite clear that an instructor being too involved in the academic-personal community would interrupt and/or change the student perception of that community.

          Ultimately, I think this topic requires greater attention and study – especially considering the continually-rising popularity of online coursework and the necessity for DL students to have a sense of community, both with their instructor as well as their peers. My sense is that encouraging students to have their own discursive space outside of the academic-professional space afforded by the course itself may in fact support student satisfaction, student retention rates, as well as facilitate greater student engagement, which of course, has been proven to foster a space in which true learning can then occur. Indeed, as Danowski notes, “feelings of empathy between students and those supporting them are central to learning in distance-education…feelings of empathy and belonging promote students’ motivation to learn, influencing learning favorably” (101).

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Selected Transcripts from 6.17.14 OWI WebEx Chat Log:

About our academic-personal community:

M:  i guess the backchat always gave me that community sense

L:  Right, agreed, Margie

S:  the first rule of back channel is you don't talk about back channel ...

M:  haha

Why our academic-personal community support matters:

M:  yeah we throw journals at each other all the time - weren't you working on something like this?

C: We have each other's backs!!

C: YUP -- plenty of anxiety -- no need to hurt each other -- we smack ourselves enough

S:  why the PhD FB group is closed and not faculty allowed.

S:  we aren't saying anything bad at all, but just want the space to feel safe and private

C:  and supported for our anxieties

L:  Support for anxieties, yes

L:  This commiseration factor is really important in building community

R:  I am not sure how people could be left out....although I am not 100% sure of the dynamic. I can say as an outsider, I have not seen that in this class, but this is the only one I have taken from the english department

Potential Drawback of academic-personal community:

C:  I think telling [undergraduates] about it changes it -- but encouraging it with freshmen? multitasking? they might not pay attention in class

General Comments on community differences:

S:  plus there's FB during class and FB as an out of class resource

C:  but in a class where the professor "required" facebook and twitter -- they were furious in my class that this was being forced on them

S:  there is the issue of trespassing into "their" space

K:  those classes are awkward.... you feel like youre being monitored for stuff you post that is not related to class

C:  these were adult students -- so that was not their space comfort

K:  and its awkward when a professor that you dont really know starts liking all of your stuff

C:  creepy

M:  haha

General profundity:

S:  community will find a way with no affordances if it wants to exist, but the abundance of affordances won't invoke community

6.4.14: Online Writing Instruction – A Pedagogy of Play

6.4.14: Online Writing Instruction – A Pedagogy of Play

               In “A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom,” Rebekah Colby argues for an instructional model in which computer game theory informs writing pedagogy. She specifically champions World of Warcraft (WoW) as the medium, and primarily advocates its use due to its “emergent” versus “progression” learning. She argues that, in using WoW throughout the term, her students were motivated through active participation, composed rhetorically-focused writing projects that were informed by their gameplay, and that their writing was circulated throughout a diverse, multi-cultural, online audience.

               Colby presents a laudable amount of contemporary research in gaming, writing, and pedagogical theory, as well as two student examples, in support of her model. She also touches upon notions of space – classroom space vs. gamespace – and the oft-held (mis)perception that they are binary opposites. Her stance is that both gamespace and class-space are similar spaces in which learning can occur, and she highlights that they are both in fact similarly “restricted, closed, protected universes.” With a very brief socio-cultural history of workspaces versus leisure and/or play spaces, she begins to make a really interesting and novel argument here. Though, intriguing as it is, the length/topic of this particular essay was insufficient to thoroughly address this aspect of her rationale and it could indeed have been an essay in of itself.

                Using real life examples of WoW pedagogy in action, Colby shares how one of her students created a strategy guide for one of the in-game professions, while another, less experienced, student created a proposal for a Twitter-like website that could track what certain players are up to in a game guild (10). Ultimately, Colby’s pedagogy of play appears to support a model of composition in which rhetorical traditions, planning, inquiry, audience, purpose, and research methodologies are all utilized. Her students have the ability to design forums, blogs, websites, and various gamespace guides” (6), in addition to composing reflective works and creating writing that has direct engagement with a large, diverse community outside of the classroom. The collaborative and open-source nature of some of the students’ writing is yet another boon to WoW pedagogy.

               Colby’s essay was both compelling and enjoyable. I personally support gaming in education and certainly appreciate the value of this model. As mentioned above, though, I would have enjoyed hearing more on her spatial debate between work/game spaces. Additionally, there are a few other obstacles that may arise with this model, among them: students not having access to WoW, students who don’t understand the gaming environment enough in order to have an enjoyable experience, student frustrations with the medium, and of course, students who simply may not be interested in RPGs or any type of gaming (I suppose they exist!). Lastly, I would have liked to have seen the actual works that her students created and study what these compositions looked like and/or view the different stages of their work. This inclusion would have not only been interesting, but would have lent even greater credence to her argument.

Shultz Colby, Rebekah. "A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom." Computers and Composition 25. Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming (2008): 300-312. ScienceDirect. Web. 3 June 2014.