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Collaboration among students, faculty to build a web site of
lasting value l Wikis as a tool for
collaborative writing l
Blogs as a vehicle for
online discussion and collaboration among students l
Digital Writing Across
the Curriculum - home One important way
in which digital writing can be qualitatively different from
traditional academic expression is in the ways in
collaboration and interaction can be important:
collaboration among authors, interaction between author and
reader.
Collaboration Among Students and Faculty to Build a Web Site
of Lasting Value
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At Old Dominion
University in Virginia, Dwight Allen and his graduate
assistants teach over 200 students in "Social and
Cultural Foundations of American Education." The course
has many sections, some taught on campus, some in a
distance learning format. Allen saw that the textbook
was not engaging students effectively, so he decided
that, the next term, the students would be assigned to
collaboratively create
their own text, using the same software used by
authors of Wikipedia. Allen's team provided the chapter
headings; students each worked on a different section,
writing for other students. Three versions of each
section were written and, later, students critiqued the
drafts, and voted for the best version of each one.
Using their advice, the faculty picked the versions for
each chapter; the other versions were also included as
supplementary material. For more on how the course and
writing were organized,
click here. To hear our April 8, 2008
FridayLive discussion with members of the ODU team and a
former student in the course,
click here.
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To hear about some
similar work on student-authored course materials at
Georgetown,
click here to hear a podcast of a talk, "The
Content Catastrophe," given at EDUCAUSE 2006 by
Deborah Everhart and Martin Irvine.
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Judi Moreillon of
Northern Arizona University provides an example of how
writing on the web can be used to educate and socialize
students into the profession of teaching. For years,
Moreillon and cohorts of her students have been
developing a growing
web site about Southwest Children's literature.
Education majors review books, create lesson plans, and
work with children in the schools; the children's works
about the books appear on the web site, too. Moreillon
has turned necessity into advantage: because her
students can't put their work on the web themselves, she
works with each of them in turn to upload the web
materials; she says this has been a rich way to help
socialize her students into the community of teachers -
in those moments, she and her students are
collaborators. And the web site provides a service for
educators around the world, especially school teachers
in the Southwest.
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Glenn Everett of
Stonehill College twice has worked with students to
create online resources about Robert Browning and other
literary figures. (Glenn at one time worked with George
Landow at Brown University; Prof. Landow's Dickens
project pioneered the use of online hypertext resources
in literature).
Here's Glenn's site.
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Here's another example of
an instructor who has involved his students, year after
year, in helping to build a major multimedia resource.
As he describes in his article in Currents in
Electronic Literacy, "Hell
Wasn't Built in a Day," Olin Bjork and his students
have been developing the
Divine Hypermedia Site on Dante's Comedy. The
site shows two translations in parallel with the
original Italian (with audio so that non-Italian
speakers can hear the sound of it), along with classic
illustrations.
Online
writing tools open new
possibilities for students to learn by writing together in
their majors, and, sometimes, teaching one another as they
do. [To learn more about wikis,
click here.]
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Students
in
Chris Staecker's Linear Algebra class have developed
this wiki, under his guidance, to collaboratively
express their understanding of the mathematics they're
learning in his course. As Chris described it in his
e-mail to us, "Any student in the class can create
articles and modify the content of any existing article.
Their assignment was to collaboratively produce an
online version of the course notes and textbook. Weekly
assignments were alternating between adding significant
new content, and editing and improving existing content.
I as the professor made no contributions of my own,
except for indicating (but not fixing) errors, and
making suggestions for improvement.
"There was also a fair amount of creativity in the
non-technical content (the site logo and images were all
created by the students). Especially in upper-level
mathematics, it's quite difficult to have a writing
component to the course, but this project worked great.
The final product, when printed, is a nice little
textbook of about 100 pages. Students have asked that we
leave it on the Web after the term ends so they can
continue to use it as a reference."
I've been hearing
observations from faculty about using blogs for student
discussion (as opposed to discussion boards) and finding
that (for good and ill) students write in a more personal
way when their discussion takes place in a blog.
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The
May 19 2007 entry in "Blogging in Education, written by
Teresa Coffman and Lisa Ames at the University of Mary
Washington, talks about this phenomenon and includes
some student blogs.
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This page
on the New Media Consortium web site exemplifies
academic writing developed explicitly to elicit comments
from an educated readership. If you have an example of
this kind of writing, created by students for a course,
please let me know. I'd like to put it here!
Please send me your comments about
this page, and new examples and ideas to add. I'll be happy
to acknowledge your help!
Steve Ehrmann (ehrmann @ tltgroup.org)
Collaboration among students, faculty to build a web site of
lasting value l Wikis as a tool for
collaborative writing l
Blogs as a vehicle for
online discussion and collaboration among students l
Digital Writing Across
the Curriculum - home
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