Archive for the 'Process' Category

Wikis in group authoring

Published
by
Cristina
on April 9, 2006
in Process, Revision and Technology
. 2 Comments

Noticeable shifts in style and grammar in a group-written paper can make it difficult reading. Further, a student may sometimes develop her assigned section in isolation from the rest of the paper, failing to build on what others have written. I’ve talked about these issues with students I have worked with. But until I picked someone else’s brain and found this page on wikis in education, I wasn’t sure how to make the collaborative writing process easier.

This is one way wikis can help. Students set up a wiki site for their drafts, with each student getting a page to write her assigned section in. After each section has been revised, say, two or three times, each student moves on to the next section and applies her revisions. She then moves on to the next section, and so forth. This may force each student to engage and build upon what others have written, as well as be committed to the overall focus and quality of the paper. Wikis smooth the workflow by eliminating the cumbersome process of emailing a Word document because several versions of the paper can be accessed via any Internet-connected computer. Wikis store a document’s history and allow “rollbacks” of changes — no messy strikethroughs and red fonts in Word’s “Track Changes” feature to deal with. I’d love to hear what others think of this process as well as any other thoughts on collaborative writing.

Attack of the Conference-Ready Undergrads

Published
by
Cristina
on December 8, 2005
in Peer Review, Powerpoint and Presentations and Process
. 0 Comments

Something noteworthy at the gem that is the MIT OpenCourseWare site: an undergraduate course on Economics Research and Communication. The course description indicates that “primary activities are oral presentations, the preparation of a paper, and providing constructive feedback on classmates’ research projects.”

Constructive feedback involves group peer review at several stages of the writing process. In nine of the thirteen three-hour sessions, students have to: (1) present initial ideas for a paper; (2) present research plans; (3) participate in open forums for discussing project difficulties and questions; and (4) make a presentation based on the first draft. Class discussions always follow presentations.

All these are probably nothing new to many of you. My undergraduate years, however, offered no such communication rigors in my major, no requirements that process be subject to peer scrutiny. How the economics curriculum was implemented at my university implied that economics was a solitary pursuit — you only needed to impress your professor on paper. Any other skills were not the school’s concern.

So I came to the U.S. shy, self-conscious, still somewhat in “I hope I don’t get called on in class” mode. Teaching has helped mitigate some of my reticence; I think I’ve evolved into a self-assured instructor. But addressing peers and superiors can still induce significant levels of apprehension, though I’m finally at the point where academic conferences and presenting at department seminars are inescapable duties. (I’ve hence sometimes bemoaned the deficits in my undergraduate education.) Here’s hoping that university departments are on track to turn out graduates more communication-savvy than I ever was.

Confessions of a Writing Teacher

Published
by
Anthony
on December 6, 2005
in Pedagogy and Process
. 4 Comments

I’ve been working my way through Laurence Sterne’s wonderfully comic novel about writing a novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , and recently came upon the following passage (from Volume 8, Chapter 2):

Of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I’m sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

Sterne goes on to speak of how the “plan follows the whole” (as opposed to the work following a plan, presumably) and though admitting that he “intercept[s] many a thought which heaven intended for another man,” he obviously prefers intuitive, discursive writing to something more planned or ideologically driven. (Pope seems to be his target of criticism here.) The approach Sterne describes is pretty much mine too (even in academic writing), though I generally don’t invoke God unless I’m trying to meet a tight deadline.

This brings up a tension I’ve just begun to think about: I teach my students to write a thesis statement, plan ahead, outline paragraphs, etc., yet I’ve never written a paper that way. Could I do an informal survey? How many of you out there begin a paper with a plan, and how many begin by simply starting to write? (I don’t mean free writing here; I mean writing something with the intention of making it work somehow.) Does anyone have any success stories about teaching academic writing in non-traditional ways?