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Articles Conference Reviews |
200724Session 2.4: The Bridging Capacities of Technology
Florence Bacabac (Bowling Green State University), James Brown (University of Texas at Austin), James Purdy (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania) All three of the presenters on this panel hailed from very different universities. However what tied their presentations together was a shared interest in the way that online social software programs, such as wikis, forums and chat rooms, can serve as a bridge between students’ personal and academic writing. Florence Bacabac, Bowling Green State University: “From Cyberspace to Print: Intersecting Practices and Academic Writing” Bacabac’s presentation focused on her research into the online invention practices of her composition students. This research stemmed from her desire to provide more opportunities for her students to engage in rhetorical discourse, and Bacabac pointed to a need for more studies that look at how students transfer their various online writing practices, such as when using chat rooms and forums, into academic writing. Grounding her work in the theories of Bartholomae, Bakhtin and LeFevre, among others, Bacabac revisited the process of invention that allows students to come up with clear essay topics. Arguing that invention is a social act, she looked at the computer-mediated communications (CMC) of her students as they used synchronous (chat room) and asynchronous (forum) discussion to generate, and to collaborate on, ideas and topics for their argument papers. Giving interesting excerpts from sample transcripts she had recorded from the CMC of her students, as well as their final papers, Bacabac was able to show that the students had in fact incorporated the collaborative material created through the CMC into their final papers. Although the asynchronous CMC had been more organized and more specific, both forms of online collaboration had proved effective and had facilitated more effective arguments in the students’ papers. Bacabac ended her presentation by calling for more research into the ways that various CMC invention strategies can help devise more effective writing-based technology pedagogies. James Brown, University of Texas at Austin: “Wikipedia: Modeling a Middle Way for Rhetoric” What motivated James Brown’s presentation was a desire to find a middle ground between what he saw as an ongoing debate: should rhetoric teach students how to create effective arguments, or should rhetoric focus on ways of reading and interpreting arguments? Brown sought to address this binary between perception and reception by offering a ‘middle way for rhetoric’ in the type of writing and collaboration done on a wiki, such as the popular Wikipedia. Inserting the writing done on a wiki into Barthes’ debate of the use of the middle voice, Brown suggests that because of their open structure, wikis encourage texts that sit between production and consumption. Brown argues that in effect wikis nullify the choice between being producer or receiver of text because the writer can be both simultaneously. A writer can not only critic the writing produced by another, but she can also go in and change that same text, thus engaging in a collaborative process that collapses the binary between text production and consumption. Brown concluded by pointing out that, through creating electronic texts like those found on Wikipedia, the modern scripter emerges as written, just as much as she writes. James Purdy, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania: “When the Tenets of Composition Go Public: A Study of Writing in Wikipedia” Purdy opened his presentation with a challenge: to rethink our attitude towards Wikipedia. He claimed that many composition teachers view Wikipedia as a somewhat inaccurate online encyclopedia that our students cite in their research papers. However Purdy argued that wikis, like Wikipedia, encourage and facilitate those activities we as composition instructors value, collaboration, revision and negotiation of information, and thus we need to look at Wikipedia in a new way. He explained that the participatory model build into the wiki’s design allows for the user to trace the history of a particular document over time, and then to edit and change that document. Drawing his examples from the larger research project of which this presentation was a part, Purdy traced the history of several different articles in Wikipedia. He showed that the changes made to the texts were not endless obsessions over grammar changes, but rather were, for the most part, substantive changes and additions, and not all of them made by the initial author. Using Wikipedia as a tool then, Purdy concludes, offers composition instructors the opportunity to show students that public documents are never finished, and that information is negotiated through the synthesis of several different positions. In short, Wikipedia offers instructors a way to expose the very messy processes of writing and knowledge-making.
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