Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
Contrails of Learning: Using New Technologies for Vertical Knowledge-building Chris M. Anson ∗ , Susan K. Miller-Cochran Department of English, 221 Tompkins Hall, Campus Box 8105, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, United States
Abstract Higher education is still dominated by objectivist models of learning involving experts who convey information to novices. Educational research has shown that this model is less effective than more active, constructivist approaches that help learners to build new knowledge on existing knowledge. Although to a lesser extent, the objectivist model is perpetuated in graduate education, a context where students are, ironically, assumed to be working alongside their mentors and becoming part of the culture of research in their fields. Using a recent report issued by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, The Responsive Ph.D.: Innovations in Doctoral Education (2005), we argue that emerging technologies can help to create constructivist learning environments that challenge students to participate more actively in their own education. As illustration, we consider a graduate seminar on educational technologies that uses a wiki not only to engage students in knowledge-building but to link subsequent sections of the course into an ongoing, purposeful activity that functions both within and beyond the classroom. We explore some of the challenges we faced in getting students to take control of the wiki and overcome their existing assumptions about power and authority in graduate education. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Constructivism; Graduate education; Wiki; Active learning; Adventurous scholarship; The Responsive Ph.D.
Higher education has a long history of focusing its articulation efforts at the programmatic or departmental level, an isolationist model that was critiqued by The Responsive Ph.D.: Innovations in Doctoral Education (Woodrow Wilson, 2005). Curricula are generally designed to equip students with the necessary knowledge, abilities, and perspectives thought to define a major or concentration. Curriculum committees routinely review and revise these requirements to ensure adequate coverage and preparation. New courses are designed to keep up with advances in the discipline and program directors try, with varying success, to maintain consistency across multiple sections and teachers of the same course. When properly supported, these latter efforts can lead to productive collaborations between teachers that include sharing ideas, teaching materials, and classroom strategies. But sections of the course are still disconnected. Each new group of students experiences the course anew, so that its advances occur laterally and without student participation, as illustrated in Figure 1. The principles of graduate education advanced in The Responsive Ph.D., however, encourage greater connectedness. Specifically, The Responsive Ph.D. focused attention on four outcomes for transforming doctoral education, all concerned with developing new kinds of connections for graduate programs: developing new paradigms for encour∗
Corresponding author. E-mail address: chris
[email protected] (C.M. Anson). URL: http://www.home.earthlink.net/ theansons/Portcover.html (C.M. Anson).
8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2008.11.002
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
39
Fig. 1. Evolution of courses.
aging “adventurous scholarship,” advancing new practices that will make doctoral education more developmental and relevant, inviting participation from new people who have not been sufficiently represented in doctoral education, and developing new partnerships that encourage relationships between those designing and teaching in doctoral programs and those who employ their graduates (2005, p. 3). Doctoral programs, therefore, should be searching for ways to make connections among disciplines, students, and the community while incorporating new approaches that will help make graduate education more relevant to the world outside of academia. While The Responsive Ph.D. focused primarily on the bigger picture of graduate schools and administrative structures, many of the changes called for in the report can be enacted on a local level, expanding the kinds of connections made in courses beyond the lateral model in Figure 1. We argue that meaningful connections can occur not just between instructors teaching the same course, or between students within a section of a class, but also across space and time, between sections of the same course. While web-based technologies have long provided the means to connect students and decrease the distance between learners (Bennett & Walsh, 1997; Herrington, Reeves, & Oliver, 2006; Mason, Duin, & Lammers, 1994; Whitaker & Hill, 1998; Yagelski & Powley, 1996), emerging technologies now offer us new opportunities to enhance course articulation and progress by connecting students across space and time. The collective work of a particular class no longer needs to remain locked in its temporal moment, disappearing at the end of the term and invisible to successive groups of enrolled students. Instead, Web 2.0 technologies can support a more participatory approach within the course—in which students actively and collaboratively research a subject area and produce and share knowledge—while also allowing traces of knowledge construction to be left for the next group of learners to view, learn from, discuss, assess, and build on in turn (Beach, Anson, Breuch, & Swiss, 2008). The use of collaborative technologies can transform graduate education into a site of knowledge construction, not simply transmission, and the construction of knowledge can take place between groups of students who were previously isolated from one another. Such a model of course articulation and progress brings together different teachers of the same course as well as students in subsequent sections in a larger collective enterprise. This approach to pedagogy represents a “new practice” that can usher in a “new paradigm” for doctoral work by involving students in the shaping of their own graduate training and asking them to re-envision the nature of doctoral education. As illustrated in Figure 2, such a model of course articulation and progress takes on a vertical and cumulative nature.
Fig. 2. Vertical model of course articulation and progress.
40
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
In this essay, we argue that the vertical model in Figure 2 is well suited to graduate education, which provides an excellent context for the kinds of experimentation and innovation necessary to realize the outcomes called for in The Responsive Ph.D. Specifically, graduate classes tend to be smaller and more focused than undergraduate classes, and students are often more serious about gaining specialized knowledge in their disciplines. The more self-directed nature of learning in the graduate curriculum provides incentive for students to participate in creating and discovering knowledge in their fields, and even for making connections between disciplinary areas that are of interest to them. Additionally, such a model allows the diverse voices of graduate students to be heard and to be a part of shaping the curriculum and their own knowledge, instead of merely transmitting the knowledge base and agenda of an individual faculty member or program. Graduate faculty and students can use the technology itself as an informal assessment mechanism to connect classes across space and time, refining each section’s constructed knowledge through networked collaboration. However, the transformation of courses from a master/apprentice to a co-learner model of education is not without serious challenges, even at the graduate level. Our efforts to use new technologies in the service of a more lateralized, participatory graduate seminar have met with mixed results, partly, we argue, because traditional educational assumptions are so entrenched not only systemically in our curricula but also psychologically in our and our students’ consciousnesses, the result of firmly established and constantly perpetuated practices. Developing and using new methodologies enabled by emerging educational technologies requires us to consciously and deliberately pressure these assumptions in our scholarship, faculty development efforts, and meta-strategies for enhancing students’ awareness of their own learning processes. The transformations called for by such an approach to pedagogy, and indeed by The Responsive Ph.D. report as a whole, are not easily enacted, and they uncover tightly held assumptions about the nature of graduate education. 1. The importance of constructivism in graduate education The scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education overwhelmingly supports instructional models in which students play an active role in the construction of their own knowledge and expertise through problem-solving activities, cooperative learning, inquiry-guided instruction, and other student-oriented methods (for meta-analyses, see Prince, 2004; Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1998; see also Yoder & Hochevar, 2005). Such methods stand in direct contrast to traditional expert-novice approaches now famously characterized by Paulo Freire’s (1970) banking metaphor, in which “the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing deposits [of information]” (p. 53). Yet in the face of powerful research revealing the pedagogical limitations of lecture (Dunkin, 1983), the dominant instructional methodology across the landscape of higher education both in the U.S. and internationally remains an expert on a stage, pouring information into students’ empty intellectual vessels, followed by objective tests that measure how well they have retained the information. Theoretically, this still-dominant approach is calibrated to the level of instruction. First-year students in generaleducation courses are usually assumed to lack even basic concepts, terminology, and general knowledge of subjects such as introductory psychology, biology, or anthropology. “Telling” becomes the default instructional mode, and presumably the most successful teachers are those who can “tell” in the most engaging ways, peppering their presentations with anecdotes and humor or using props and gimmicks to convey complex information (see Biggs, 2003). At higher levels of the curriculum, in the major, students more often participate actively in the work of their chosen fields, especially through various projects, assignments, and hands-on learning. This developmental model, in which the conveying of information gradually gives way to more active learning at more advanced levels of the curriculum, is itself problematic, but it implies that by the time students enter into graduate education, there is almost no excuse for them to be placed into the role of passive recipients of knowledge. Yet experience suggests otherwise. The very structure of education, at all levels, encourages the persistence of the lecture model (see Nunes & McPherson, 2003). In fact, it is not uncommon for professors to assume that at the highest reaches of graduate programs, students are so self-motivated and involved in their chosen fields that they become excellent listeners and note-takers, attentive to every pronouncement of the expert teacher. Likewise, it is not uncommon to pass by the room of a small graduate seminar and observe the professor filling the ears of a handful of students with his or her erudition. At the same time, these students are assumed to be gaining ground as coequals and colleagues who should be participating in the collective mediation and creation of new knowledge alongside their professors. A collaborative approach, more suited to facilitating students’ involvement in the construction of knowledge in the
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
41
course, would provide a more relevant and practical introduction to how scholars participate in the ongoing discussions of their academic discourse communities. In questioning teacher-directed models of learning at the graduate level, we want to draw a distinction between two very broad educational ideologies often captured in the terms “constructivism” and “objectivism.” Both these concepts have complex philosophical histories which are beyond the scope of this essay to chronicle; they also encompass a wide variety of methods and concepts. In the context of education and learning environments, several scholars have synthesized these broad categories in ways that provide a helpful backdrop to our explorations of emerging technologies in graduate education. Objectivism, which provides the foundation of traditional giver/receiver models of learning and is based on the principles of behaviorism, assumes a “classical tradition of transferring some body of knowledge in the form of unchangeable and authoritarian ideas, concepts, or definitions to the learner. . . According to this objectivist view, concepts are considered external to the learner and received through a process of communication” (Nunes & McPherson, 2003, n.p.). As David Jonassen, Mark Davidson, Mauri Collins, John Campbell, and Brenda Bannan Haag (1995) further explained, The objectivist paradigm (which provides the foundation for symbolic reasoning) assumes that the world is structured, that structure can be modeled and mapped onto the learner, and that the goal of the learner is to “mirror” reality as interpreted by the instructor. Knowledge is external to the knower and so can be transferred (communicated) from one person to another. The learner’s role is to remember and reproduce the knowledge that is transmitted by the teacher or professor. These assumptions are most often manifested in what Schank and Jolla (1991) call the “sponge method” of instruction. In the sponge method, the teacher imparts knowledge to the learners, who absorb it. During the assessment phase, the knowledge that learners should have acquired from the teacher is “wrung out” of them. The quality of learning is considered a function of how well the student can reproduce the thinking of the instructor. (p. 10) In contrast, educational constructivism assumes that new knowledge relies on what the student brings to it from prior learning and experience. The learner actively creates understandings through this interaction. Learning is a “process of building knowledge,” and communication—whether oral, written, digital, or in some other medium—is a “process of making meaning” (Nelson, 2001, p. 23). In this sense, constructivism differs epistemologically from objectivism in that “knowledge is a function of how the individual creates meaning from his or her experiences; it is not a function of what someone else says is true. Each of us conceives of external reality somewhat differently, based upon our unique set of experiences with the world and our beliefs about them” (Jonassen et al., 1995, p. 11; see also Bruner & Feldman, 1990). Translated into instructional methodology, constructivism creates classroom environments that look quite different from traditional lectures and other teacher-centered approaches. Peter Honebein (1996) characterized such environments in terms of seven goals (see also Jonassen, 1991). They: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Provide experience with the knowledge construction process; Provide experience in and appreciation of multiple perspectives; Embed learning in realistic and relevant contexts; Encourage ownership and voice in the learning process; Embed learning in social experience; Encourage the use of multiple modes of representation; and Encourage self-awareness in the knowledge-construction process. (p. 11)
At the core of these goals is the relationship of the learner to what is being learned and, especially, what the learner does in the process of learning (see Biggs, 2003). As implied in The Responsive Ph.D., a constructivist approach allows the flexibility necessary to reform doctoral training and values student participation and input in the generation of knowledge. The difficulty of using constructivism to structure a class session, course, or curriculum, however, is reflected in Jonassen’s and other scholars’ rendering of them as goals or design principles rather than as simple instructional methods or strategies—that is, they are theories begging to be instantiated in practice but difficult to enact because of existing constraints and inherited assumptions about how students should learn and be taught. The seminar that forms the basis of our reflections on constructivism in digitally-mediated graduate courses positioned us to adopt a
42
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
constructivist mode in the classroom by virtue of several unique characteristics (and also illustrated for us the nature of some of the difficulties inherent in enacting a constructivist pedagogy); but these characteristics are not common to most undergraduate and graduate courses. 2. The context: seminar in digital pedagogy The context in which we describe and theorize a vertical model of learning and knowledge-building based on constructivist principles is a doctoral-level course in the new Ph.D. program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State University. This required course, “Technologies and Pedagogies in the Communication Arts” (CRD 704), is offered each fall by different faculty members. Because the program itself focuses on cuttingedge technologies and their application to a variety of educational and business settings, including those explored in this special issue, our context offers us a kind of reflexivity for investigating how technologies can enhance graduate education through more reciprocal, cross-section knowledge-building. Students in the program are interested in the ways in which technologies mediate communication; in this course specifically, the students are called upon to reflect on the use of technologies for facilitating teaching and learning. Introducing new technologies to students in the course, and using those technologies to build connections in innovative ways, provides a metacognitive opportunity for students to reflect on their own learning as they investigate and discuss the use of instructional technologies. The newness of the program was an important feature in our analysis. Because this course had never been taught before, its prototype, included as part of the proposal for instituting the program, had been created with some degree of tentativeness. Its first iteration (taught by Chris Anson) underwent significant modification from the prototype and, like any first-time course, its design was by no means well established. The second time the class was taught (by Susan Miller-Cochran), it was significantly modified again. In addition to the kinds of adaptations that are always necessary when an instructor teaches a course for the first time, many revisions were necessary due to the introduction of several new, relevant technologies in the year that had passed (microblogging, for example). Second, the course itself focuses on a disciplinary area under formation and with a very recent history of scholarship. From this perspective, we both found ourselves reflecting on our role as “authorities,” knowing that we were in many respects co-learners with our students. Instead of being able to choose famous works on, for example, the “history of ancient rhetoric,” as we set up the course we found ourselves scanning the literature for just-published articles and research reports that we thought would be important for students to read. The idea that we could select from an existing canon of works and be prepared to comment on and analyze them soon yielded to our modified position as co-explorers and co-learners with our students, the difference being mainly in the wealth of other information, perspectives, and “ways of knowing” that often differentiate novice from expert learners in a field. In the area where digital media intersects with the teaching of communication, much of the scholarship is emergent, and we could rely less on foundational literature except material that offers theoretical backdrops for the exploration of recently published work. Third, the interdisciplinary nature of the graduate program impacted the design of the course. As students take courses that draw on the scholarly traditions of communication, rhetoric, and digital media studies, they are encouraged to find ways to make new connections between disciplinary areas in their own work, advocating the kind of “adventurous scholarship” called for in The Responsive Ph.D. (p. 3). The faculty teaching in the program and the students entering it, however, have generally been trained primarily in either English studies (rhetoric and composition, technical/professional writing) or communication studies. This continuously developing and shifting interdisciplinary environment provides rich opportunities for faculty and students to learn from each other’s expertise in their disciplines, “remix” that knowledge, and develop their own understanding of intersections in the scholarship. Each course provides an opportunity for students (and the faculty teaching the course) to learn about perspectives from another discipline, and often these learning opportunities are presented by others in the class who have experience in different disciplinary areas. The combination of teaching a course in a new, interdisciplinary graduate program and dealing with an area of emerging scholarship provided a unique opportunity to introduce an instructional environment designed both to serve as an ongoing space for our collective research in the field and to allow us to connect courses across space and time and provide a learning environment where students could actively participate in knowledge construction. We chose to introduce a wiki into the class to serve this purpose. The potential of wikis to facilitate collaborative writing and social construction of knowledge has been well documented (Garza & Hern, 2005; Gilbert, Chen, & Sabol,
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
43
Fig. 3. CRD 704 course wiki.
2008; Nelson, 2008); but we also realized that collaboration through a wiki must be carefully facilitated for it to be effective, regardless of the level of the students. As David Falvo and Sharon Solloway (2004) reported in their study on constructing community in an online graduate course, “how the technology is used is more important than what is used” (p. 57). Carefully structured activities and incorporation of the technology into the course outcomes and goals provide the greatest possibility for successful collaboration between participants in the class, including both students and the instructor. To this end, both authors incorporated assignments into the seminar that encouraged students to interact with each other and begin the process of collaboration that would extend to the wiki. Students facilitated class discussions on readings related to technology and pedagogy. Additionally, each week one student would introduce the class to an emerging instructional technology that the students would experiment with and discuss, a process that frequently placed us, as teachers, into the role of co-learners (we also took our turns in the rotation of presentations). Students also worked on an ongoing research project throughout the semester that they discussed episodically with the class and that led to the sharing of resources such as annotated bibliographies. To accomplish the objective of having students collaboratively construct knowledge in the course during the first year it was offered, Anson created the wiki that would serve as a foundation for future iterations of the course. In its original design, it included basic course information such as assignments, readings, and course policies. The wiki was hosted on North Carolina State University’s wiki server, WolfWikis, based on the MediaWiki software application, at http://wikis.lib.ncsu.edu/CRD 704 (see Figure 3). WolfWikis are accessible to the public but are only editable by users with NC State Unity accounts, which include all students, faculty, and staff at the university. While this localized the scope of wiki production, we hoped that students in the class would reflect on the pedagogical advantages and disadvantages of using the WolfWiki application as opposed to other open source alternatives. 3. Creating the prototype In the first year of the course, the wiki was linked at the course web site. The main purpose of the wiki was to serve as a developing repository—a kind of miniature Wikipedia—for bibliographic information in the domain of emerging digital technologies and communication education. In this sense it took the form of what Mark Phillipson (2008), in his taxonomy of wiki functions, called a “resource wiki,” the “assemblage of a collaborative knowledge base” (n.p.). Anson created a rudimentary menu structure before the start of the course where students would place
44
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
references and brief annotations to the literature. However, each student also had a personal section dedicated to the ongoing research project, the goal being to provide all members of the class with “windows” into the development of the individual research projects. Students were strongly encouraged to look at each other’s sites, add notes and references, and collectively learn from the projects. In this sense, the space also served as a “presentation wiki,” which, as Phillipson (2008) described it, is generated primarily for the convenience of the class, for peer evaluation, and for providing practical experience in the effective use of a communication forum. A presentation wiki may aim, eventually, to represent the class to the outer world, and it may even hope to grow into a research resource in its field. Its primary aim, however, is to leverage wiki software in order to support a class in its efforts to access, organize, and manipulate information effectively. It is thus more self-conscious than a resource wiki, and more likely to highlight the process of assembling the information it contains. In the introduction to the wiki (and in the course overview), students were told that at the end of the course, they would need to dissolve the personal spaces by moving all useful information, references, links, and other materials from their projects into the main wiki content, which would carry over to subsequent years. However, their final research projects would be left behind in a to-be-designated space so that future students could not only read and learn from their work but also build on it in their own projects and potentially even reference it in what we speculated was a fascinating new way of creating student-generated intertexts in a form of “course-internal” scholarship. The wiki was also linked to a course blog used mainly to discuss readings and new technologies and to share ideas. For the first third of the course, the students (and Anson) used written text as the main medium for blogging. After a reflective transition, the class then embedded podcasting into the blog as the new medium of response and reaction. The last third of the course began with another reflective pause about podcasting, after which everyone embedded videocasting into the blog, again culminating in a reflective turn at the conclusion of the course. In all respects, the nascent wiki was designed to be built, not only in the content students would add to the existing structure but in the structure itself. On multiple occasions, Anson explained that the nature of the wiki, right down to its assumptions about how information should be organized and what sorts of information should be included, was entirely open to modification. The wiki was described not only in its belongingness—to the class as a whole—but in its not-belongingness, as a resource that would cross the boundaries of the course and ultimately serve an array of needs and interests of an international public. As the course proceeded, Anson was thrilled with the show-and-tell analyses of technology and the use and explorations of the different modes of blogging (text, audio, and video). Typical of seminars like this one, the students made slow progress on their research projects until after midterm, and Anson interpreted the general lack of information in each student’s personal wiki space as evidence of simple procrastination. Meanwhile, the function of the wiki as repository of ongoing information was slow to develop, in spite of the fact that students knew a portion of their final assessment would be based on the extent of their contributions to the site. Most concerning, however, was the students’ reluctance, in spite of frequent admonitions and invitations, to develop the structure of the wiki. The initial menu, for example, included broad bibliographic categories of “books,” “articles,” “papers,” and the like. It soon became clear that such categories would be unhelpful, if not subdivided into specific areas of content or coverage, to future students or other researchers. All of the students were highly experienced with the technology behind the wiki—some even more than Anson himself—yet throughout the course no one ventured to change its structure. As more resources appeared, they remained organized by the existing wiki structure that Anson had established. Students fit the information that they were discovering into the predetermined categories. 4. Building on the base In the second year, the wiki acted as the primary course web site, and students were again asked to contribute to the space and make it their own. Instead of keeping one collective blog as a class, students kept individual blogs but linked them to each other through the wiki, an addition that had the potential to push the wiki toward Phillipson’s (2008) “illuminated” function, in which wiki contributors “incorporate the subject of study into the wiki itself” that includes commentary, analysis, and markup of source documents. Students also added information and notes about different technologies used in the course (building on the information gathered and posted the year before), and they posted updates on their ongoing research projects to contribute to the developing resource of information about technology
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
45
and pedagogy. Specifically, students followed the pattern from the previous year of creating their own space within the wiki to post information about their project, starting with an annotated bibliography. As in the first year, students persisted in their reluctance to alter the text in or the structure of the wiki—either what the instructor developed for their course that semester or what had been written and developed the year before. Even as the instructor of the course, Miller-Cochran found herself struggling with how to transform the wiki for a new group of students without changing “too much” of the work done by the former class (Anson and his students). For example, she found herself wavering between two options for design: should she create a new page for the assignments and readings for that semester? Or should she make changes to the page that was created for readings and assignments the year before? In essence, she found herself in a similar position to that of the students: how much can be altered and how much should remain the same? Would changing basic structural assumptions of the wiki make it unrecognizable and less useful for the students who had contributed to it the year before? Miller-Cochran resolved her initial dilemma by adding a new page with readings for the semester instead of rewriting what Anson had constructed the year before. Throughout the semester, students participated in the wiki in marginally engaged ways. They posted links to their blogs and updates from their ongoing research projects (both of which were assignments, the former actually done in class together). Students commented on each other’s work when assigned to do so but tended not to write in the wiki outside of class time. Toward the end of the semester, students were assigned to think about restructuring the wiki space. When “required” to participate in the construction and revision of the wiki, students chose to add sections that would make the wiki a useful reference for them later. For example, one student added a page with links to the various web-based technologies used in class that semester, and another added notes from class discussions of those technologies. Students still did not restructure the foundational space of the wiki per se; they added to the content and structure that was already there. Although Miller-Cochran had not anticipated this response when she gave the assignment to think about restructuring the wiki, she also realized that students had to negotiate “rewriting” what their instructor had written (as well as what a previous instructor and class had written), an understandably uncomfortable task even when invited to do so in a collaborative space. Indeed, Miller-Cochran had responded similarly in her own restructuring of the wiki before the semester began. In both iterations of the course, then, two teachers fully committed to constructivist principles of education, with long histories of incorporating active-learning strategies in their courses and a dedication to introducing new paradigms and practices to their students, found it challenging to move students fully beyond traditional educational models in which teachers represent classroom authorities whose curricular structures, methods, and materials are not easily taken over by the classroom community. These notions persevered in spite of an easygoing relationship between teacher and students and a course that itself focused on the very issues we are analyzing here. Traditional, hierarchical patterns of teaching and learning persisted in spite of the inclusion of the wiki in the course. 5. Conclusions While the early introduction of a cross-semester wiki into CRD 704 has not yet produced the sort of collaboration we originally anticipated, it offers a valuable opportunity to examine and understand some of the challenges inherent in teaching and learning in such a collaborative space. If the teacher is the original designer of the wiki, then students might be reluctant to revise; doing so might seem to threaten the teacher’s authority in the class even though the purpose of the wiki might be to facilitate collaboration and challenge these traditional notions of hierarchy in the classroom. Research in computers and writing has long questioned claims of egalitarian discourse in networked environments (Hawisher & Selfe, 1991; Regan, 1993; Romano, 1993), but the egalitarianism narrative often resurfaces when new technologies are introduced. Students’ hesitancy might be especially apparent if the teacher has set up an elaborate wiki in advance of the start of the class, even though research also shows that a poorly structured networked environment is ineffective as well (Falvo & Solloway, 2004). Evidence shows that the technology itself, in this case a wiki, does not change the power dynamics present in the class, or in the ways that an instructor, through the course design, system of assessment, assignments, and coordination of class time, gives the students cues about the educational ideology at work. For example, David Elfving and Ericka Menchen-Trevino (2008) described the use of a wiki started in a communication program as a resource for students and faculty. Their analysis of the use of the wiki in two graduate communication courses, mostly populated by the same students at the same time, showed that while one class (Comm 502) generated over 700 edits and over 100 pages of new text, the other class (Comm 500) showed far less activity. Elfving and Menchen-Trevino explained this discrepancy as a function of the way the two classes were structured:
46
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
Comm 500 took the form of “traditional lectures and classroom activities,” while Comm 502 was “designed to promote student collaboration”: [The] lack of participation by the same students using the same platform in Comm 500 is significant. We feel that it is important to recognize that minor differences in the nature of the classroom and the relationship between students may result in radically different usage. The lack of wiki use for Comm 500 does not represent a failure of the technology, the students or the instructor. The course simply didn’t present a task requiring wiki collaboration. In this instance, a wiki was not a relevant tool. (n.p.) Furthermore, the notion of social construction of knowledge can run counter to students’ understanding of intellectual property, an ideology that remains at the heart of academia. If a fellow student or teacher has posted an idea, reflection, or claim on the wiki, or has established a particular structure for organizing material, other students might be concerned that their contribution would alter it (an assumption strongly reified in “competitive” educational practices). While part of the answer might be to give students clearer guidelines about how to contribute to the wiki, an equally compelling strategy would be to engage students in the discussion about how the use of wikis in academic settings can transform our proprietary understanding of scholarship. Even when scholars collaborate traditionally, they tend to have clear boundaries; they invite collaborators and negotiate meaning with each other. In a wiki such as the one designed for CRD 704, students were asked to construct and negotiate meaning with students and an instructor who were no longer present and who would not likely participate in the conversation if the second generation chose to transform the texts that the first generation previously constructed. The concept of collective ownership on which wikis were founded (see Lamb, 2004) is pressured when different groups are asked to “own” the space more intensely at different points in time. Another challenge is to incorporate the wiki into the course seamlessly and effectively. To achieve the constructivist potential of the wiki in the class, the instructor has to carefully design activities that will help students interact with each other (and with the instructor as a collaborator in the process). Regardless of the “level” of the learners, an effective learning experience—especially an interactive, socially constructed one—needs to be carefully planned by the instructor. Successful use of collaborative technology does not happen on its own. We might assume that graduate students would actively participate in the social construction of knowledge because of their high level of motivation and expertise in the subject, but most graduate students have achieved success in their previous academic experience by behaving in individualistic ways in classrooms, viewing their own and others’ work with a kind of proprietary interest motivated by competitive models of performance and assessment. Wikis can disrupt those patterns (if that is what is desired), but only if they are structured to do so. Technology does not have the agency to change classroom practice and alter the learning environment on its own. This realization leads us to a paradox. As teachers, we want the wiki to be able to function on its own and for students to participate in the social construction of knowledge through the use of the technology of their own volition, a view that replaces the “apprenticeship” model of graduate education with a truly collaborative model (see Burmester, 2000; Sosnoski & Burmester, 2005). But they have spent many years being taught (and succeeding well) at learning in a specific educational context—with a teacher who takes charge in the classroom and, in the inherited hierarchy of education, more often plays the role of a leader than a collaborator. As teachers experimenting with a new instructional technology, we have a challenge to overcome—we either must convince students that the wiki is truly a collaborative space (complicated by the process of assessing individual achievement), or we must accept the role of leader-facilitator and structure the space in a way that facilitates the kinds of learning to which we are committed. Because of the nature and content of the course, though, we can ask students to reflect on this experience as well, even discussing this challenge that we have faced as the instructors of the course by involving them in various kinds of self-assessment activities typical of constructivist learning models (see Tynjala, Mason, & Lonka, 2001). Informal conversations about these challenges with the first two groups of students confirmed our conclusions about the incorporation of the wiki into the course: they found it challenging to “own” the wiki when it wasn’t really “theirs” and when it was cast as something that others would then take over in later sections of the course. Successfully incorporating a wiki into our graduate seminars is an ongoing project, one that has much potential for collaboratively building knowledge and challenging our notions of intellectual property. By connecting groups of students over space and time, such a model can draw students into the life of the discipline in more meaningful ways than exposing them only to the work of experts, give them a voice in the construction of knowledge in their discipline, and help them engage in the scholarly discussions and negotiations that will characterize their work throughout their
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
47
academic careers. Realizing that potential, however, requires careful negotiation of the instructor’s and students’ roles in the class and meticulous planning of how the wiki will be woven into its activities. If such a pedagogical approach is to help make the kinds of connections called for in The Responsive Ph.D., we could incorporate it into the class in ways intentionally designed to develop those connections. For example, we could invite others outside of the graduate program to blog with us and to contribute to the wiki—professionals in industry, others interested in technology and pedagogy, and academics from a variety of institutions. We could specifically invite prior students to respond to blogs and post to the wiki after finishing the course. As students engage more often in such educational approaches, the paradigm of learning that we struggle to overcome will gradually give way, through repeated experience, to one in which projects like the wiki will seem as common as the essay exams and the traditional papers it will replace. Chris Anson is University Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University, where he works with faculty in nine colleges to enhance the role of communication in the disciplines. A scholar of writing, language, and literacy, he has published 14 books and over 90 essays and articles, and has spoken or run faculty-development sessions across the U.S. and in 19 foreign countries. Susan Miller-Cochran is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University and Director of the First-Year Writing Program. Her research focuses on the uses of technology in teaching writing, especially with second language writers. She is especially interested in the ways that different technologies can facilitate writing, research, and collaboration, both in a classroom and at a distance. Her work has appeared in Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and she is also an editor of Rhetorically Rethinking Usability (Hampton Press, forthcoming) and Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition (National Council of Teachers of English, 2002).
References Beach, Richard, Anson, Chris M., Breuch, Lee-Ann Kastman, & Swiss, Thom. (2008). Teaching writing using blogs, wikis, and other digital tools. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon. Bennett, Michael, & Walsh, Kathleen. (1997). Desperately seeking diversity: Going online to achieve a racially balanced classroom. Computers and Composition, 14(2), 217–227. Biggs, John. (2003). Teaching for quality learning at university (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. Bruner, Jerome, & Feldman, Carol F. (1990). Metaphors of consciousness and cognition in the history of psychology. In David E. Leary (Ed.), Metaphors in the history of psychology (pp. 230–238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burmester, Beth. (2000). Writing (into) the academic past, present, and future: Graduate students, curriculum reform, and doctoral education in English studies. Composition Studies, 28(2), 113–135. Dunkin, Michael J. (1983). A review of research on lecturing. Higher Education Research and Development, 2(1), 63–78. Elfving, David, & Menchen-Trevino, Ericka. (2008). One wiki, two courses. In Robert E. Cummings & Matt Barton (Eds.), The wild, wild wiki. Retrieved from http://www.wildwiki.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main Page Falvo, David A., & Solloway, Sharon. (2004). Constructing community in a graduate course about teaching with technology. TechTrends, 48(5), 56–85. Freire, Paulo. (1970). The pedagogy of the oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Garza, Susan Loudermilk, & Hern, Tommy. (2005). Collaborative writing tools: Something wiki this way comes—or not! Kairos, 10(1). Retrieved from http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/10.1/binder2.html?http://falcon.tamucc.edu/wiki/WikiArticle/Home Gilbert, Dan, Chen, Helen L., & Sabol, Jeremy. (2008). Building learning communities with wikis. In Robert E. Cummings & Matt Barton (Eds.), The wild, wild wiki. Retrieved from http://www.wildwiki.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main Page Hawisher, Gail, & Selfe, Cynthia L. (1991). The rhetoric of technology in the electronic writing class. College Composition and Communication, 42(1), 55–65. Herrington, Jan, Reeves, Thomas C., & Oliver, Ron. (2006). Authentic tasks online: A synergy among learner, task, and technology. Distance Education, 27(2), 233–247. Honebein, Peter C. (1996). Seven goals for the design of constructivist learning environments. In Brent G. Wilson (Ed.), Constructivist learning environments (pp. 11–24). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Johnson, David W., Johnson, Roger T., & Smith, Karl A. (1998). Cooperative learning returns to college: What evidence is there that it works? Change, 20(4), 27–35. Jonassen, David. (1991). Objectivism versus constructivism: Do we need a new philosophical paradigm? Educational Technology Research and Development, 39(3), 5–14. Jonassen, David H., Davidson, Mark, Collins, Mauri, Campbell, John, & Haag, Brenda Bannan. (1995). Constructivism and computer-mediated communication in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education, 9(2), 7–26. Lamb, Brian. (2004). Wide open spaces: Wikis, ready or not. Educause Review, 39(5), 36–48. Mason, Lisa D., Duin, Ann H., & Lammers, Elizabeth. (1994). Linking learners: Structuring a mentoring via telecommunications course. Computers and Composition, 11, 123–135.
48
C.M. Anson, S.K. Miller-Cochran / Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 38–48
Nelson, Nancy. (2001). Writing to learn: One theory, two rationales. In Paivi Tynjala, Lucia Mason, & Kirsti Lonka (Eds.), Writing as a learning tool: Integrating theory and practice (pp. 23–36). Boston: Kluwer. Nelson, Thomas J. (2008). Wiki as textshop: Constructing knowledge in the electronic classroom. In Robert E. Cummings & Matt Barton (Eds.), The wild, wild wiki. Retrieved from http://www.wildwiki.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main Page Nunes, Miguel Baptista, & McPherson, Maggie. (2003). Constructivism vs. objectivism: Where is difference for designers of e-learning environments? In Proceedings of the 3rd IEE international advanced learning technologies conference (pp. 496–500). Phillipson, Mark. (2008). Wikis in the classroom: A taxonomy. In Robert E. Cummings & Matt Barton (Eds.), The wild, wild wiki. Retrieved from http://www.wildwiki.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main Page Prince, Michael. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(3), 223–231. Regan, Alison. (1993). “Type normal like the rest of us”: Writing power and homophobia in the networked composition classroom. Computers and Composition, 10(4), 11–23. Romano, Susan. (1993). The egalitarianism narrative: Whose story? Which yardstick? Computers and Composition, 10(3), 5–28. Sosnoski, James J., & Burmester, Beth. (2005). New scripts for rhetorical education: Alternative learning environments and the master/apprentice model. In Virginia Anderson & Susan Romano (Eds.), Culture shock and the practice of profession (pp. 325–345). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Tynjala, Paivi, Mason, Lucia, & Lonka, Kirsti. (2001). Writing as a learning tool: An introduction. In Paivi Tynjala, Lucia Mason, & Kirsti Lonka (Eds.), Writing as a learning tool: Integrating theory and practice (pp. 7–22). Boston: Kluwer. Whitaker, Elaine E., & Hill, Elaine N. (1998). Virtual voices in “Letters across cultures”: Listening for race, class, and gender. Computers and Composition, 15(3), 331–346. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. (2005). The responsive Ph.D.: Innovations in doctoral education. Retrieved from http://www.woodrow.org/images/pdf/resphd/ResponsivePhD overview.pdf Yagelski, Robert P., & Powley, Sarah. (1996). Virtual connections and real boundaries: Teaching writing and preparing writing teachers on the internet. Computers and Composition, 13(1), 25–36. Yoder, Janice D., & Hochevar, Catherine M. (2005). Encouraging active learning can improve students’ performance on exams. Teaching of Psychology, 32(2), 91–95.
