Wiki Reader's Guide is the New Annotated Bib!

The first digital technology I ever used for collaborative writing in the FYC classroom was the wiki. From the beginning I was captivated by the ability to rapidly build pages that were capable of deep connectivity and cross-referencing. It wasn't long before I had the idea to adapt the annotated bibliography into the wiki format. Suddenly the annotated bid, which traditionally had the audience of a desk drawer, could be presented as a resource for current and future researchers. As digital publications, wikis can be tagged with keywords, making them relevant to internet search engines. 

This semester student teams designed wikis to exhibit their library research on specific issues within college education. Individuals focused on a specific issue about college education, completing a library database search for recent, peer-reviewed articles from academic journals. Every student collected 2-3 articles which were read and analyzed before building the wiki site. Each team collaborated on a homepage which introduced the context for their inquiry into college education while also introducing the individual page links that led to the article reviews. The team effort helped the class collaboratively identify, research, analyze, and write about specific issues in college education such as poverty in college, national curriculum, grade inflation, gender bias in the classroom, self-segregation on campus, and more. 

Of course the real substance of the wiki reader's guides can be found in the student's article reviews. Students created MLA-style bibliographic entries to accompany their rhetorical analysis, summary, and personal response to each source.

We analyzed other professional and community wikis to see how authors presented the links to various pages. Students then experimented with various strategies  for presenting the links to the article reviews.  One method was to create a page directory like the student example below:

Other student teams integrated the hyperlinks in the prose introduction as seen in the student example below. This strategy lends itself to building complex texts which reference and cross-reference webpages on the site or beyond. 

Perhaps the most creative strategy was to use an auxiliary text to set the context for the links. One student team used issue-relevant comic strips to introduce the links. This multimodal approach also creates the rich intertextual connections between academic, popular, and student authors.

Overall, the wiki reader's guide assignment appears to give students a purpose and location for recording their important analysis of library sources. The use of article databases allowed students to join an ongoing academic conversation while situating it in their own publications and student communities. One of my favorite moments in this assignment was when students held a roundtable to discuss the articles they read. Students spoke with authority and deep investment in particular issues in college education. I recommend this assignment to any writing teacher who wants students to find, analyze, and map secondary sources for a researched writing project.

Academic Argument

When students arrive in the UWRT first year composition course, they know how to write a five paragraph essay about as well as they can do anything. This means that they are experienced in making a claim and supporting it with reasons and evidence. Yet many of these students create thesis statements about what they already believe, using obvious examples form their personal experience. In a writing and inquiry course, students need to enter a conversation, consider alternate ideas and opinions, and read credible sources before writing a thesis statement. This semester, we accomplished this by investigating college movies. Students viewed college movies of their choosing and made arguments about the representations of stereotypes and issues of gender and race.

I presented the genre of academic argument by using the textbook From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader by Greene and Lidinsky. This text gives a straightforward steps for the inquiry project, and there is a chapter on academic argument. The course's common readings about college education and media came from this text. We also used Writer/Designer to better strategize and design academic argument in multimodal texts. Unfortunately, download problems with the e-texts of the latter book stunted our use of this excellent resource.

To help students gain practice in making academic arguments, we began by analyzing the claims made by the author's we read in From Inquiry. These readings presented arguments about such college issues as national curriculum, grade inflation, gender bias in the classroom, self-segregation on campus, and more. Students learned about claims of fact, value, and policy, and tried to identify these types of claims in the authors' texts. Next, students began their own claims about a college movie as working thesis statements, using the steps presented in From Inquiry to guide the process. Each individual student published 2 blog posts that present academic arguments about the college movie and specific issues such as gender and race on campus. Before this publication, students posted rough drafts in an online forum where they received feedback from team members. After publication, students participated in a blog symposium in which they responded to the blogs as an informed audience, developing conversations about these important issues.

Collaborative Blogging about College Movies

Collaborative writing has become much more productive with the development of software that can support multiple, and even simultaneous, editors. Previously, "group" projects have been troubled by logistical challenges, unclear expectations concerning the division of labor, and difficulty producing a physical collaborative text. Now, students can write and design together in class, from a distance, and in asynchronous process.

One concern that emerges when assigning collaborative compositions is that individual students do not receive enough support for their writing. Collaboration succeeds in major learning outcomes such as rhetorical awareness and the development of a process because teams work towards these together. Bt what about the individual students ability to transfer these strategies and awareness to future writing situations? Don't students need feedback about their individual efforts in invention, organization, and sentence writing?

Formatting problems occurred when multiple students pasted into the blog post from various writing platforms (word processors, forum posts, online documents).

Sometimes students wrote "place holder notes" to their team members, forgetting to delete them in the final text.

The first person voice was sometimes used in individual contributions to team-authored texts. We discussed the strategies for unifying the voice of a collaborative text, including using a collective "we" or writing entirely from third person perspective. 

Building in individual contributions and accountability.

Analysis of movie choices.

Project Forums

Team processes. Midterm portfolio includes important student descriptions.

My responding. Feelings about outcome.

College Movies

What can college movies show us about university education? The simple utterance of "college movies" probably makes you imagine a long lineage of grotesque comedies which celebrate hard partying and sexual promiscuity. I must admit to having reservations about bringing movie analysis into the first-year writing course.

IMDB Monsters U

Analyzing college movies was not my idea. I used the basic scaffold of an assignment sequence presented in the appendix of From Inquiry To Academic Writing. The model suggested using movies that represent learning and education. I made the decision to let students choose any movie from any genre as long as it represented college education in some way: drama, comedy, farce, musical, horror, whatever. In the beginning I planned to have each student team choose a single movie. Already I was worried about students feeling pressured to choose some low-rent college party flick. Unexpectedly a female student from Pakistan declared that she already knew the movie that she would pick: 3 Idiots, a Bollywood film about college (IMDB 3 Idiots). I realized that I had to give individual students the freedom to situate their inquiries within the world that they inhabit. The students, more than me, would know what movies to choose. 

We combed online lists of college movies. Students played trailer after trailer. In many cases, sheer economics and online availability shaped student decisions. If a movie wasn't available in soft copy, then it didn't make the cut. The students accessed the films through Cable On Demand, NetFlix, YouTube, and various movie streaming sites.The two most popular movie choices included  Accepted and Neighbors. (IMDB Accepted , IMDB Neighbors).

The decision to let individuals choose a movie rather than one team movie. The tension between collaborative and individual composition.