Teaching Students to Write in the Open

Laura Blankenship — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:55:00 +0000

Besides the copyright and business tensions inherent in any discussion about Open Access, another conflict I’ve seen arise is the discomfort some researchers have in exposing their work to a broader audience. They are used to writing for people in their narrow field of expertise, people who understand the lingo, the previous arguments that have come before, and the underlying assumptions in their field. There is potential, in putting your work on the open web, to have to answer different kinds of questions about your work, questions that might make you squirm. While it still might be a rare occurrence that a housewife with an interest in ecology will email you a question about your latest paper, your students are already living their lives online via blogs, Facebook, gaming, and other web-based applications. But they don’t always know how to do that appropriately or how to respond to people outside their circle of friends. My dissertation was about using blogs to teach writing, primarily because I felt that students needed to learn to write for and respond to a real audience. The method of simply writing a paper to be read solely by the teacher just doesn’t get to all the nuances of addressing a broad audience, nor does it motivate a student to necessarily make their best effort.

In Inside Higher Ed a little over a week ago, Robert Cummings writes a very interesting piece explaning how he uses Wikipedia for many of the same reasons I used blogs. It’s an excellent explanation of his reasoning behind the Wikipedia assignments and of how, exactly, the assignment is laid out. There are over 50 comments on the article, many of which are quite negative, revealing the tensions between those who are attempting to teach students how to navigate the networked environment, part of which is learning to share their work in public, and those who think the networked environment lacks quality and rigor. That’s perhaps putting the tensions a little too simply, but I think that’s the gist of the situation. In addition to helping students learn to write in different ways, there is the potential of these types of writing assignments will imbue the networked environment with more quality and rigor. Further, as part of such assignments, students can learn what constitutes quality, rather than simply relying on their teachers to tell them what quality work is.

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Teaching Students to Write in the Open