Teaching Web 2.0, part 2

(I know it's long, but I hope you'll still read it, especially if you're a writing teacher.)

As I mentioned in this post, I have chosen to analyze user-generated web content in my Advanced Composition class because most students are already personally invested in it and because it raises interesting issues about composition.

I have to keep the discussion of the latter part on the light side because I don't think they're entirely ready to deal with those issues in depth. Part of that is because, despite what the title of the class seems to indicate, this is a sophomore-level course. They are still dealing with a lot of writing issues that are covered in freshman composition, which many students never actually took because there are so many ways to get out of it. What I want them to do, mainly, is to expand their concept of writing to include composition on the web, with its fluidity and temporality and globality and hypertextuality and collaborativality (okay, so that's not a word--I got carried away). I want them to think about what they write online as writing.

The major obstacle to that is a continued attachment to paper. Now, I'm not saying that I don't like paper. Paper is fine. But there are all these new ways to write that don't quite feel as legitimate as paper. The traditional academic paper with its page counts and red pen grade marking. Anything else seems less serious, less academic. They (we, everybody) need to be able to take electronic texts seriously, as they read them and as they compose them. To that end, I'm conducting an almost paper-free class (with the exception of the textbook) to distance them from paper and force them to participate in electronic composition and communication for a grade (and doesn't that somehow make it real and legitimate--when it's for a grade?).

But I'm not doing anything especially revolutionary here. I think that I could have gone much farther, but I'm holding back. I'm still requiring the traditional academic papers that are in the familiar paper format. They are composed, submitted, peer reviewed, and graded entirely electronically--never printed out. But still, the electronic versions of the papers are just an imitation of the printed papers. They have the same visual format, the same page breaks, the same everything, just appearing as an image on the computer screen instead of in their hands. Even that much distance from paper is unsettling for some. In his course evaluation last semester, one student from Technical Writing, a totally web-based class, lamented the loss of the red pen on his graded papers. He felt like the electronic grademarking, which mimics the red pen, was not as effective.

I am keeping the traditional paper format this semester for several reasons. One is that I have an obligation to them to prepare them for academic writing that will be required of them in other classes. Even though they were supposed to learn the conventions of academic writing in freshman comp, I still feel like I would be misleading them if I attempted to change the way they conceive of academic writing when in reality the college papers that are assigned in every class are not much changed. Another reason is that they are comfortable with the traditional format, and they feel more like they understand what is expected of them. If I tried to turn their whole notion of writing upside-down, I think that they would be so distracted, and some of them upset, trying to figure out "what I'm looking for" in their writing projects that I would have to sacrifice a lot of the work that I want to do with them. I'm not sure that they would be better writers at the end of the class, and to make them better writers is my primary goal.

Also, I must admit, the traditional paper format is more comfortable to me because I know how to grade it. I know how to grade it because I have written many and they have been graded and I have modeled my grading on my experiences as a student. (This is the first time I've really connected grading with being a student, but isn't that how we learn how to grade? Certainly no one has ever taught me how to grade a paper.) When I assign innovative projects, I am frequently pleased with the results but also left with the problem of trying to assign grades for which I have no previous reference. I just don't know what to do with them.

So what I'm doing this semester is easing them into electronic, web-based composition for low-stakes assignments but still taking the biggest parts of their grades from traditional papers. I am asking them to analyze electronic communication and write papers about it, which I guess is another way of easing them into the thing. We are using "Web 2.0," or user-generated content, or whatever you want to call it, every day, but our foundation is still paper, even if that paper appears as an image on the screen. I think that I've made the right decisions for the class (actually, I may have gotten in trouble with the department had I done anything too different), but I still feel like I'm doing it half-way, holding back. And the result of that is that I feel like I am trying to sell my students on something and they're not really buying it.