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Digital Writing Across the
Curriculum l Implications of
Technology for the Shape of a College Education
"Hot Button Issues": "Good writing"
is a hot button issue for many, and there are suspicions
that any attention to digital writing Across the Curriculum
(DWAC) will detract from more traditional writing skills.
We disagree. We predict that, done well, digital writing can
enhance traditional skills as well, not least because the
potentially public nature of digital writing provides more
motivation to be understood, and respected. But such
objections are grounded in experience, and may be correct.
Institutions ought to explore digital writing as they should
explore traditional writing: looking for empirical evidence
of how student learn and how those skills of writing are
valued by graduate schools, professions and the students
themselves (e.g., after graduation). All the ideas
below are based on the assumption that faculty with
different views and assumptions are working together to
explore whether, when and how to foster digital writing
across the curriculum.
Developing faculty skills of digital
writing: Institutions will move toward
fostering and exploiting digital writing skills of their
students about as fast as members of the faculty themselves
become skilled digital writers. In a study done in the 1980s
at Michigan State University, Peter Lyman found that faculty
and teaching assistants taught students to write with word
processors in the same ways that they, the instructors, used
word processors in their own writing. So one of the most,
perhaps the most important driver of digital writing
across the curriculum for students, is the frequency with
which the instructional staff use digital writing for their
own professional publications. The Bay Area Writing Project
and the National Writing Project based their efforts to
improve writing instruction on the assumption that faculty
needed to learn themselves how to write better, how to
accept assistance from peers in writing, and how to offer
such assistance. The same logic makes sense to us for
digital writing: start with peer communities of faculty
learning together how to write for professional and personal
purposes.
Course development: A
complementary strategy is to help faculty gradually, or
dramatically, redesign courses in order to take advantage
of, and teach, student digital writing.
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The University of
Southern California's
Institute for Multimedia Literacy has been offering
such faculty development for several years. Early on,
when they had a grant, they also offered faculty members
a teaching assistant who was already skilled in
multimedia.
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If your
institution is a TLT Group subscriber, we could help you
design such a program, including guest speakers, online
workshops and/or designing requests for proposals from
interested faculty.
Needs Assessment and
Formative Evaluation: How many
faculty at your institution already teach skills of digital
writing? How many ideally would like students entering their
courses to already have such skills? In what ways are some
courses already being changed to take advantage of digital
writing? How do instructors want the institution to improve
support for digital writing? What kinds of digital writing
are students doing now? year by year, are these examples of
digital writing across the curriculum growing and changing?
These are some of the questions that an institution might
want to ask of itself.
Do you have additional
thoughts to suggest about how faculty members and
institutions can grapple with issues of digital writing? Has
your institution begun to do so? What have you been
learning? Please contact Steve Ehrmann (ehrmann@tltgroup.org);
we'd like to include your thoughts and experiences on this
web site.
Digital Writing Across the
Curriculum l Implications of
Technology for the Shape of a College Education
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