KairosWikis | CCCCReviews / Session O1

Riding the Wave: The Impact of Emerging Digital Genres on Academic Writing
reviewed by Joel Wingard
jwingard@moravian.edu

The first speaker, Ruijie Zhao of Bowling Green State U., described her use of a wiki in an intermediate composition course. She briefly compared a wiki with a Blackboard site: the latter is more hierarchical in structure, teacher-oriented, and not subject to change once it is set up; whereas the former works to decenter the writing classroom. Using a wiki had both advantage and disadvantages, the speaker said. Among the advantages were:

an assignment is always available for students to check as needed,
students felt empowered,
and it wasn’t hard to use.

Among the disadvantages were:

students were reluctant to write in the wiki,
editing of drafts had to be sequential—not simultaneous,
some students saw the wiki as extraneous because it was not on the course Blackboard site, which the class also had.

All this seems to amount to only slight advantages to using a class wiki instead of a Blackboard site. If so, one might wonder if the some of the presenter’s data were at odds with her promotion of wikis as collaboration space in the writing classroom.

Speaker #2, Judith Edminster, also of BGSU, said the title of her presentation listed in the program was incorrect, and that what she was really going to talk about was how the traditional geology field journal could be improved by moving from handwriting to digital writing. She had observed two groups of students doing field research in the West (Colorado and Wyoming) and provided a table of student responses to a survey that compared paper field journals and digital ones. Again somewhat incongruously, the survey showed equal preference among students for paper and digital field journals.

The third speaker was also at Bowling Green. She reported on her efforts to spread digital assignments from English courses to across the curriculum. In a colleague’s writing for the Web class, the teacher worked with remediating the book review digitally; students wrote book reviews for Computers and Composition Online. She closed by urging compositionists to talk to colleagues in other disciplines about digital assignments.