Digital writing is focused on, if not limited to social media for most students, especially those in high school and early years of college. As Jen Rajchel, author of “Consider the Audience” on Web Wrting: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching & learning suggests, by the time of their freshman year in college, most students are immersed in networked media, forming a connection with friends and family through shared experiences on the internet. These experiences could include pictures, videos, favorite music and more. A change in context of the use of social media, specifically a shift from being focused on high-school students to being focused on college students, and possibly professors provides new ways of using the same media in a different way.

For personal, academic and professional reasons, the question of whom to be connected with and whom not to be connected with can be a critical question. Social media is an easily accessible way of reaching out to audiences on the internet through the availability of greater circulation. Rajchel compares web writing to thinking in public. This connotation has both advantages and risks. Web writing provides new writers with the chance to expose their work through a greater audience. This however, also leads to greater chances of being slaughtered by critics in case of mistakes. “Among the most important contours of web writing is the ability to negotiate publicness.” (Rajchel) As a result, the publicity that you get through the internet could be your greatest friend or foe depending on how you make use of it.

“When students publish online, they assume the responsibilities of authorship. The consideration of such implications for visibility is crucial for students, especially those who might not have picked a career path.” And so, the impact that your online work can have on your career, really depends on which direction you want to take your own career. Therefore there could be a greater degree of freedom on what you write about for some than for others. “Too often the digital fluencies of incoming students are confused with mastery of platforms and skills. Sophistication with media platforms should not be defined only by the ability to successfully complete a task on an interface” (Rajchel). The ways of manipulating a media platform usually goes much deeper than what most people think such platforms are capable of. Open-source platforms can therefore play a very significant part in the presentation of one’s blog.

Digital writing is, as mentioned earlier, widely used in pursuit of finding larger audiences. Many students who are web writers want their work to circulate beyond the classroom. Rajchel lists the ability to synthesize informaiton, read quickly and deeply, and enaging in discussions with candor and humility, as important aspects of liberal arts education that we learn from reading across disciplines, developing expertise, and delving in to discussions in school environment. These same qualities can be instrumental at improving a writer’s eloquence.

Another factor that has major implications on web writing is the issue of glottalization, not just as a result of the boundless nature of the internet, but also, especially in the United States, because of the cultural melting point that it has turned into. As a result, cross-cultural perspectives from a writer’s point of view can greatly attract approval from a wider, global audience. In the chapter “Web Writing as Intercultural Dialogue” in Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning, author Holly Oberle mentinos that “according to the Institute for International Education, the 2011-2012 academic year was witness to the largest enrollment of international students in the United States, with nearly 75,000 students from primarily China, India, Saudi Arabia, and South Kore.” Although this too could have a reactionary effect towards “intensifying stereotypes and stifling intercultural dialogue”, Oberle suggests that globalization of education might facilitate cultural exposure and understanding.

The turn towards web writing as one of the many teaching tools in a 21st century classroom is an exciting development if appraoached cautiously, and with vigil for opportunity, especially as it relates to cultivating more cohesion among diverse students.” Web writing can function as an influential intercutural dialogue platform as it changes the typical ‘one-person audience’ scenario into an interactive platform where multiple audiences can offer feedback and enhance the writing experience, adding perspective on the same topic from different cultural backgrounds. “ Writing on the web exposes students to a wider audience, and forces them to consider a pseudo-global audience and thus how they may be interpreted, as well as their own political and social biases” (Oberle). Another important part of successfully implementing web writing is to actively converse with the readers and reply to their feedbacks and comments. “What is extremely important to the success of web writing as intercultural dialogue is the active and consistent participation of the instructor.

In her article Blogging in the Language Classroom: It Doesn’t “Simply Happen”, Carla arena Refers to blogging as affective tool for conversations, to improve thinking skills, and a way to gathering an authentic audience. As Arena points out, blogging doesn’t “just happen”. It is a great way to ignite conversations on topics of all sorts, and as the conversation starts taking a particular direction based on the voices of the writer as well as that of the audience, it demands and excercises certain thinking patterns. A given topic is bound to attract certain audience groups and not so much other groups. This means that the writer starts gathering an audience with a similar voice or outlook. Arena puts an emphasis on tagging on the success of blogs.

Tags simply help readers to recognize the content of an article without actually having to go through it. “Tagging can take a community of bloggers to establishing dialogs on any topic that interests the group and keep them archives in one single online space with the advantage of its being dynamic. Often when you tag, you can get an unexpected feedback and start a new node in the communication network you are building up with others who share common interests” (Arena). Tagging can also provide a network of writers to maintain connection within each other’s blogs and convert audiences, and can therefore be a tool to attract new audiences.

Most academic writing done for school courses tend to be rigid in the sense that they demand a writer’s perspective  (i.e if it is not completely a research paper) on a narrow set of topics, which although does exercise the writer’s skills on focalizing on a theme, can also bog down their creative aspect. Academic papers, more than often, suppress a student’s creative side as the demand is mostly put on specific facts and details, and on a particular style of writing. Although this is helpful in gathering information, it lacks emphasis on insightful knowledge, and limits a student’s ability to explore a subject. Of course, this may not be possible in case of subjects like mathematics and physics, but some room for exploration would definitely lead to students to further understand certain topics through different perspectives. Having said that, it is important for writers on the web to study and understand certain of their own writing and that of their audiences, especially when the internet allows you to target certain groups more easily than traditional media. Digital writing classes can off this freedom to students who not only get to freely express the writers within themselves but also the advantage of sharing those ideas with readers and expanding on their work through the ideas of those readers.

The opportunity of reaching an unlimited audience allows the writer to expand on an idea through an almost infinite array of inputs. After all, ideas only expand when shared, and web writing is an excellent platform to do so. Writers have the freedom to completely chose what they want to express and then gather ideas from an audience on the same topic by creating engaging conversations and developing on the idea. Not only does this help further expand understanding on the writer’s part but also that of the audience. As Rajchel and Oberle both suggest, the opportunity for intercultural dialogue, and to choose one’s audience, both raise the potential to do so. Many classrooms which do allow students to explore topics and style of writing of their own choice are often not web based and therefore may limit the exploration of the style and theme. Others, do not even allow that freedom of choice on style and/or theme depending on the course and subject. This could inhibit students from realizing their potential as writers and also at finding their own niche as writers. Therefore, more classes that allow students to freely express their writing need to adopted in order to not only improve students abilities to better express themselves through writing, but also encourage a greater number of students to get involved in writing. As long as students have this freedom but are still guided by teachers at the fundamentals of writing, this would allow new writers to develop proper writing skills while developing their own niche as writers. Once students realize the potential of the vast array of writing, this would encourage students to write even outside classroom environments.

References
Arena, Carla. “Blogging in the Language Classroom: It Doesn’t “Simply Happen”. Web log. TESL-EJ. N.p., 2008. Web. 2 Oct. 2013
<http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a3.html>

Rajchel, Jen. “Consider the Audience” Web log. Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning. N.p., N.d. Web. 2 Oct. 2013
<http://webwriting.trincoll.edu/engagement/rajchel-2013/>

Oberle, Holly. “Web Writing as Intercultural Dialogue.” Web log. Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning. N.p., N.d. Web 2 Oct. 2013
<http://webwriting.trincoll.edu/crossing-boundaries/oberle-2013/>

What is Digital Writing?

Digital writing is as vast and varied as the imaginations of those who compose, create, and craft it.  Digital writing can be anything from Twitter posts about what you ate for breakfast, to theses on urban storm water management, to funny and sarcastic critiques on the world at large.  I want to discuss good digital writing, especially in the context of learning inside and outside of classrooms.  Within its usefulness as a learning tool, digital writing has three main tenents: it is public, is it collaborative, and it is writing to learn.

Writing in Public

Digital writing’s inherent public nature gives students a responsibility to engage the topics learned in the classroom in a thoughtful way.  Though there are ways to make digital writing private (i.e. not publishing your blog, protecting tweets, etc.), writing privately removes this main tenent and does not provide the full digital writing experience.

Writing for a public audience requires an important shift in how students think as authors.  As Natalia Cecire stated in How to Public Like a Frog: On Academic Blogging, “thinking in public is a difficult habit to get into…because public is the place where we’re supposed to not screw up, and thinking on the fly inevitably involves screwing up. Blogging with any regularity in essence means committing oneself to making one’s intellectual fallibility visible to the world and to the unforgiving memory of the Google cache” (Cecire, 2011).  Awareness of the permanence of digital writing forces students to think through their opinions more thoroughly than when they are writing for a private audience.  Though it is fine to be biased as long as you are transparent about your bias, students do not want their opinions to seem uneducated, underdeveloped, or subjective.

Having a public audience, rather than a single-person (the professor) or a small audience (classmates), is especially valuable for classrooms because students “have a greater responsibility to engage more deeply, to understand everything [they] need to understand, because [they] have a greater responsibility to educate and reach out to a larger audience” (Crawley, 2012).  For example, Amy Howard used a blog in her class, “The Urban Crisis in America,” to help students truly understand and engage with the issues that Richmond, VA faces.  She explains that having multiple components (a blog, video project, and research paper) that gave students a “greater responsibility” pushed students to engage and understand Richmond because they had to educate their classmates and the public on the issues they had chosen to study (Howard, 2010).

Writing Collaboratively

Writing collaboratively allows students to learn from each other, gaining an overall deeper understanding of the material presented in the classroom.  Having a student scribe each day who posts the lesson highlights for the other students on their classroom blog is a good example of learning collaboratively.  Using this method, the student scribe, at least for their assigned day, is truly engaged in the material and must figure out the best way to present it so that the rest of the class can understand and benefit from his or her knowledge (Leuhmann, 2009).

Furthermore, writing collaboratively mirrors the professional world that students will enter.  Professionals work together to develop ideas and build off of the ideas of others.  For example, rarely will you see a scientific article with only one author.  With this idea in mind, Michael O’Donnell, a chemistry professor, used wiki’s to allow students to collaboratively write lab reports (O’Donnell, 2013).  Each student wrote a part of the report and made comments on their group members’ sections, with one student acting as the principle investigator to make sure the entire report flowed together.  Professor O’Donnell saw success from this method because students felt they had more help while writing lab reports and better understood the scientific process, even if at times they were frustrated with their group members.  Even within fields in which sole authorship is more common, collaboration with and feedback from peers is an important part of the process.  Blogs can help students get feedback from their classmates and the public through comments on their blog posts.

Writing to Learn

As E.M. Forester said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”  A blog gives students a chance to find out what they think by writing about topics covered in class.  Students can write to learn rather than learn to write.

During class debates or discussions, often it is difficult for students to articulate their opinions and arguments because they have not yet tried to explain them to others.  Writing on a blog, students can take the time and space to develop their knowledge and opinions on the ideas presented in class.  For example, two high school teachers who used classroom blogs found that writing allowed students to create strong opinions by fully considering counterarguments and having a place to reflect on their learning (Leuhmann, 2009).  Writing to learn is a valuable exercise because students learn more when they engage with ideas by writing about them.

In a world where problems need increasingly interdisciplinary solutions, writing to learn on blogs can help students develop the important skill of drawing connections between fields and ideas.  Teachers and professors can prompt students to draw connections in more typical academic writing, but the blog provides a powerful tool for drawing connections because other students and the public can expand on connections students make and offer connections that students did not previously consider.

Digital Writing and My Experience

In my opinion, digital writing brings immense value to the classroom.  It motivates students to learn, allows them to collaborate, helps them think through and reflect on their ideas, and so much more.  Two of the most important functions of digital writing are the ability to explore ideas and make connections between them.

In my own experience starting a blog about sustainability and livability within cities, I am discovering digital writing’s ability to help me explore my ideas by allowing me to write to learn and inviting feedback from the public.  My blog allows me to develop my thoughts and opinions on sustainable cities as I write them down in a manner that is intelligible and interesting to others reading the blog.  It forces me to attempt to explain my position and to fully consider counterarguments.  Moreover, once I start posting, the audience of interested citizens and professionals will be able to correct me, challenge me to expand my views, and point me to additional resources and information.  Their knowledge will become an invaluable part of my learning.  If my writing were private, I would not be able to collaborate with others to expand and improve my ideas.  I think that this blog will become invaluable to my own learning because it is public, collaborative, and it allows me to write to learn.

Furthermore, using digital writing to illuminate connections between seemingly dissimilar fields would be particularly helpful in interdisciplinary explorations, such as Environmental Studies, which is my major.  I would love to see the environmental studies department at Dickinson College begin using a blog because I frequently make connections between my interdisciplinary classes, but rarely do I formally write them down and strengthen them by examining them.  I think the department would benefit from a blog because professors and students could examine the connections between classes, but also because they could see connections they might not have previously made by reading others’ writing on the blog.

Works Cited

Cawley, Stephanie. “Re:Humanities ’12.” Interview at Re:Humanities ’12. Web. 1 Oct. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59D2AAQHyYg.

Cecire, Natalia. “How Public Like a Blog: On Academic Blogging.” Arcade (blog). 20 Apr. 2011. Web. 1 Oct. 2013. http://arcade.stanford.edu/editors/how-public-frog.

Howard, Amy L. “Engaging The City: Civic Participation And Teaching Urban History.” Journal Of Urban History 36.1 (2010): 42-55. Social Sciences Citation Index. Web. 27 Sept. 2013.

Luehmann, April, and Robyn MacBride. “Classroom Blogging In The Service Of Student-Centered Pedagogy: Two High School Teachers’ Use Of Blogs.” THEN: Technology, Humanities, Education & Narrative 6 (2009): 5-36. Education Research Complete. Web. 29 Sept. 2013.

O’Donnell, Michael. “Science Writing, Wikis, and Collaborative Learning.” N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. 15 Sept. 2013. Web. 25 Sept. 2013. http://webwriting.trincoll.edu.

Rajchel, Jen. “Consider the Audience.” N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. 15 Sept. 2013. Web. 25 Sept. 2013. http://webwriting.trincoll.edu.

Yang, C., and Y.-S. Chang. “Assessing The Effects Of Interactive Blogging On Student Attitudes Towards Peer Interaction, Learning Motivation, And Academic Achievements.” Journal Of Computer Assisted Learning 28.2 (2012): 126-135. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Sept. 2013.

The Internet has transformed from a space primarily used to retrieve information to a network for advancing and engaging such information. Moreover, the web has become a space to share ideas; it gives way to open participation, interaction and creative expression. Anyone can write and share ideas on the Internet; alternatively, anyone can read what is put onto the web. Such an open forum raises anxieties of authority: who am I to say what is that I am saying? Similar issues of authority in writing come to the surface in academic environments. In this way, the liberal arts classroom offers an ideal setting for practicing and teaching web writing, sot hat students may experiment with authority in a diverse writing environment. While web writing is a useful tool in academic environments for dealing with authorship and authority, it also brings up the problem of public and private space. How should professors and students decide how public student writing should be online, and what are the advantages to public writing? The liberal arts classroom offers an ideal space in which to grapple with these issues of student authorship and authority, offering a secure medium between public and private spaces.

In her article “Consider the Audience,” Jen Rajchel argues that it is essential to consider web writing in the liberal arts setting in order to take advantage of circulating student work; the tension arises when considering how to negotiate public and private spaces. Although students are familiar with interacting with peers through different forms of web writing – mostly through social media – there is a shift in boundaries when students move into new environments (Rajchel 3). Just as there is a shift in audience and context when students write on the web, there is a platform in the liberal arts classroom, which facilitates a similar environment (Rajchel 6). In these new boundaries of the classroom, new questions are raised: How does one brand oneself on Twitter? Do I friend my professor on Facebook? In this context, we as web writers must consider how public we wish to be with our audience, and how to maintain the amount of privacy that we desire. In order to determine this, we consider the risks and benefits of claiming authorship on the web through the structure of the liberal arts classroom.

Jack Dougherty’s article “Public Writing and Student Privacy” similarly grapples with ideas of negotiating authority in public and private spaces, and offers a perspective of the benefits of writing publically. Like Rajchel, Dougherty values the notion of extending the liberal arts education to the web, which allows for students to engage with ideas and conversations that are occurring outside of the classroom. Dougherty contends, “One of the best ways to improve critical thinking and writing skills is to post work in public, beyond the four walls of the classroom, and to invite others to respond” (Dougherty 4). He further asserts that prose has a greater potential to improve when the writing is aimed at a real audience, beyond simply the eyes of the professor. In the same sense, a true audience offers practical and diverse feedback, as well as alternative points of view (Dougherty 6). Dougherty and Rajchel are in agreement that writing for a more public audience gives way for more constructive and relevant criticism, which ultimately produces a stronger claim to authority.

Inevitably, writing in the public sphere directly intersects with issues of authority. The public sphere is a place in which we are not supposed to make mistakes, which makes writing publically more intimidating, particularly when there is a lasting record. Rajchel argues that when students are writing something that goes beyond the classroom, students feel greater responsibility to engage deeply and understand everything, because what is written will educate and reach a larger audience (Rajcel 13). Rajchel writes, “When students publish online, they assume the possibilities of authorship, which has online archival record long after its publication” (Rajchel 14). In this sense, there is more of a pressure to write well and knowledgably when writing is shared in the public sphere, and students are less inclined to claim full authority for their writing.

Alternatively, while Cheryl C. Smith agrees with Rajchel that students are likely to feel insecure as they transition into college classrooms with new expectations and audiences, she argues that error and fear of error should be used as a learning tool (Smith 36). Smith cites blogs as a “straightforward way to negotiate tensions of error” (Smith 37). Smith describes blogs as a platform for writing that supplement more traditional forms of writing without detracting from them, while also increasing opportunities for student expression, collective brainstorming, and community (Smith 37-8). Further, Smith states that when writing publically, students must be given a comfort zone, where they are able to examine their own experiences, while still encouraging them to venture beyond the familiar. Blogs do exactly this; they offer a place to negotiate the tension between making students comfortable with their own writing, and pushing them outside of their comfort zone to a place where they may take risks and interact with people in new ways (Smith 38-9). Ultimately, Smith argues that blogs create a safe place for risk-taking and error, which gives them the ability to empower students who are developing their own authorial voice.

Dougherty further raises the issues of students’ rights to privacy with their writing. He cites that “all students deserve – and are legally entitled under U.S. law – to some degree of privacy in our educational institutions, and ownership over the words they have authored” (Dougherty 16). Dougherty identifies that the root of students’ fears of publishing in the public sphere under their full names is that the writing that is published lasts much longer and is widely circulated; fears of error affects students’ decisions to write publicly online under their own name. Further, the anxiety of whether or not people will actually read what is written affects web writer’s validation that their words have been seen and have value. Nevertheless, he maintains the opinion that he wants all of his students to publish writing on the public web under their own names; however, he also encourages his students to retain control over their words. This offers a version of blogging as a “safe place” that Smith proposes.

In her article “Authority Issues In Online Instruction,” JoAnne M. Podis questions how the relationship between instructor and student shifts in an online forum. Podis asks the question: “How do the students’ contexts – social, educational, and personal – influence the authority relationship online as opposed to within the classroom?” (Podis 170). Although Podis argues that the authority of the professor lessons in an online environment, she also asserts that the professor becomes a point of security; because the professor is a source of familiar criticism, his or her criticism in a public space is readily accepted. Podis argues that her students are more sensitive to online criticism of their work. She believes that this could be for two reasons: first, that her students are accustomed to having only one audience – the professor – or, that her students’ experience with online communities where comments are commonly mean-spirited and aggressive (Podis 174-6). Ultimately, although Podis agrees that online writing fosters a more intimate relationship between professor and student, publishing in a public space raises anxieties for students. Alternatively, Julie Frechette asserts that allowing students to write and express themselves using a communication tool that they are familiar with and that is native to their generation enriches learning experiences and authorship. She argues that using familiar technology actually encourages authorship because students begin to see themselves and producers of knowledge who can “secure and legitimate cultural space to represent their world view and the fruitions of their education” (Frechette 23). In this sense, Frechette is arguing that writing in digital environments actually increases authority in writing, as opposed to increasing anxieties.

Rajchel ascertains that when it comes to negotiating public space, audience becomes the most difficult aspect. The web allows fro a diverse audience, but it also permits a broader dialogue between the readers and writer. Through writing, we engage in performance. In this sense, Rajchel determines, “liberal arts degrees can be thought of as training in the art of the audience. We are constantly being asked to articulate the role of rhetoric, the position of the speaker, and the effect on the audience” (Rajchel 23). Ideally, web writing offers a platform through which the liberal arts classroom can be expanded.

In terms of encouraging students to claim authorship of their work, I believe that there is a valid place for instruction on web writing in liberal arts classrooms. When it comes to issues of public and private publishing, Dickinson College has a useful medium to negotiate this space. Many Professors at Dickinson use Moodle forums as a kind of class blog. Moodle serves as an online extension of the liberal arts classroom, where conversations can continue and evolve in a different forum. In my own experience, the ways that Professors choose to use Moodle vary; some professors use Moodle to ask specific discussion questions, while other professors offer it as an optional space for continued discussion. In my senior seminar, my professor uses Moodle as an outlet for us to post our completed assigned papers if we choose to, although it is not required. In this instance, we are given the option of how public we wish to make our writing amongst our peers. I find Moodle beneficial in terms of expanding and articulating ideas that I was not able to say in class discussion. Further, Moodle is useful in terms of getting an understanding of what my classmates are thinking about; it offers a visual connection between different ideas. Moreover, Moodle makes it easy for peers to respond to one another and relate ideas. Writing in an online environment certainly implies a level of casual writing that is still insightful and conversational, which offers a useful break from formal academic writing.

However, although Moodle is meant to be a more casual space for student writing and discussion, there is undoubtedly a level of self-consciousness and anxiety when it comes to writing online. Professors are not necessarily always actively a part of the conversation that takes place on Moodle, however they do view the discussions; further, depending on the situation, they grade what is posted on Moodle. In this respect, I still feel pressure to write formally on Moodle with the knowledge that I will be graded on what I post. In other words, Moodle still feels like a high stakes environment for publishing writing. However, what I am most conscious of when posting on Moodle is that my peers will also be reading what I post; my writing is typically kept between myself and my professor, so opening it up to people in my class often changes the way in which I write.

The assigned blog project for Writing in and for Digital Environments has offered an ideal medium for writing in a public space; though people outside of my peers and professor will be reading what I write, this type of writing is less formal and more natural. Further, this blog project serves as a kind of connective tissue between my academic interests and allows me to apply what I have learned about academic writing in a different context. Blogging is the first opportunity I have had as a student at Dickinson to truly connect my academic interests. As an English and American Studies double major, I do a lot of analytical writing and critical thinking. However, this kind of writing and thinking does not always easily translate to every day conversations. This blog project allows me to create an intellectual conversation about issues that are discussed in the classroom, and revise them so that they are more approachable and relatable to everyday life. Admittedly, I have always struggled with issues of authority in my writing, so this blog project has raised some anxieties about publishing my writing in a public space. However, having the opportunity to write about something that I am passionate about makes writing in the public sphere less intimidating.

Ultimately, I believe that the liberal arts classroom offers an ideal space in which to deal with these issues of student authorship and authority. Tools like Moodle offer a space in which to publish publically with lower stakes and a limited outer audience. In some ways, this offers practice in both conversation and receiving criticism online, and claiming authorship over writing. Student blog projects offer a progression of these practices, ultimately allowing students to publish in a public space, that offers control of how much they wish to publish and identify with their work.

Works Cited

Dougherty, Jack. “Public Writing and Student Privacy.” Web Writing: Why & How and for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning. 15 September 2013. Web. 3 Oct. 2013.

Frechette, Julie. “Learning Beyond the Classroom Walls: Keeping Students Engaged in Class 2.0.” The Journal of Media Literacy. 3 September 2013. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.

Podis, JoAnne M. “Authority Issues in Online Instruction.” Working with Student Writers: 169-178. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.

Rajchel, Jen. “Consider the Audience.” Web Writing: Why & How and for Liberal Arts Teaching& Learning. 15 September 2013. Web. 3 Oct. 2013.

Smith, Cheryl C. “Technologies For Transcending A Focus On Error: Blogs And Democratic Aspirations In First-Year Composition.” Journal Of Basic Writing 27.1 (2008): 35-60. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 13 Oct. 2013.

The digital world is always shifting and we all know it. Myspace, once the king of social networks now finds itself clawing for any slight bit of relevance. Meanwhile, it’s successor, Facebook, is looking for every way imaginable to cement itself as a permanent force of the internet by providing convenient social systems (i.e. commenting, sharing, “likes”) that other websites are eager to employ. In slightly over 5 years, one service toppled another transferring millions of users. This is just a brief mention of how quickly the digital world shifts. In the meantime, education still has not fully embraced the digital age. Citation systems still are not sure if URLs should be required, teachers are hesitant to allow electronics in class and most courses have little to no content available online. This is beginning to change as schools realize the convenience and power of the digital world in educational systems.

A common sentiment made about writing digitally is that it removes students from the pressure of a class. This is both good and bad, Amanda Hagood and Carmel Price note in their article Sister Classrooms: Blogging Across Disciplines and Campuses, that having discussion over the internet is liberating for students. It allows them to write out their thoughts, rewrite them, fully flesh out their idea before they publish the idea. Hagood and Price note that students give superior answers online, where they can use writing as a way to learn, rather than being a product of learning. (Sister Classrooms) In a standard classroom, the student is pressured to know the answers at a moments notice, to formulate opinions and answers in seconds. It’s an incredible amount of intangible pressure, something that can often get results, but the results are consistently less thorough than those produced in online writing. When writing in a standard classroom setting, the teacher will usually assign a topic and the student will produce a paper directly on the topic. There will be a revision and a final draft, but the paper is designed to prove that the student understands the concepts taught in class. But often, a student will learn more from writing the paper than he or she will from the actual reading and lesson. (Writing Analytically, 6)

Digital writing is very different; a blog is asynchronous. In the words of Hagood and Price there is an, “absence of faces, voices and other non-verbal cues that help us understand face-to-face conversations.” We understand this to be detrimental in discussion groups, that speaking and discussing through digital means produces less efficient results because the extra effort must go into writing to be clear. It also requires the participants to be incredibly clear about what they mean, often at the expense of prose. This means that digital writing and commenting can simply confuse the student, unless the class is instructed in how to write a useful and clear critical analysis of the original work. (Hagood and Price)

While usually detrimental to prose, this lack of physical presence can be beneficial. Eric Zhi-Feng notes in his paper Using Peer Feedback to Improve Learning Via Online Peer Assessment, that students often feel anxiety during peer review of their work and that peer review through digital means (i.e. commenting systems, forums and Twitter interaction) actually reduces that anxiety by providing a distance between students and their peers. It is both a literal and metaphorical glass wall between students and criticism. It means that students are more relaxed and accepting of criticism, in fact, students reported back that they actually had a positive attitude towards the feedback. The students also reported that they had a much higher quality and quantity of feedback. (Zhi-Feng; Grabill) This feedback comes from an online community; ones who read and care about the subject that a student writes about. It can be other classmates, professors, perhaps just an engaged stranger. It changes the landscape of who the student’s audience is, taking what was previously just an assignment and putting the student in the shoes of an educator. It gives a student a sense of agency over their work that is lacking from standard assignments.

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Educational research is not the only field that has noticed the trends that digital writing produces better results. In his TED Talk, Dan Pink, an author and expert on business and management, examined evidence showing that extrinsic incentives for accomplishing tasks caused a negative impact on any task that required even basic cognitive skill. This is completely counter to the way education currently works, the “carrot-on-a-stick” model of creating a better portfolio or writing a better paper for a better grade. Instead, what improves creative performance are three things: autonomy, mastery and purpose. (Pink) Autonomy is the idea that a the student is given the freedom to direct their own work. Mastery is simply the desire to improve in a topic or subject that matters, something echoed by students at Haverford who started the group RE: HUMANITIES. RE: HUMANITIES is an undergraduate conference on digital media run by Haverford College students, currently in it’s fourth year and showing a vast amount of growth. One of the students who helped organize the conference in 2013 commented saying that, students “feel like you understand everything you need to understand because you have greater responsibility to educate and to reach out to a larger audience.” (RE: HUMANITIES, 2:28)

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59D2AAQHyYg”]

Finally, Dan Pink cites purpose as something that motivates people to work creatively, the idea that what they are working on has “a larger meaning.” Digital writing takes the ideas in class and makes them applicable on a larger level, allowing students to take the lessons they learned in class and make them relevant to the average person. Writing with purpose means that the student’s work isn’t just written for a professor, it’s written for other experts, or possibly for those who have no background in the subject.

These are all properties of writing in a digital environment that aren’t possible in the same manner via a standard classroom setting. Digital writing allows the student a measure of autonomy in their work, while still remaining on topic with their class and learning far more than what they would have learned had they been assigned a topic.

Digital writing allows the student a chance at mastery of their topic, by writing to learn and then move on to educate, rather then using writing as a way to simply prove that learning has occurred. It also gives students a sense of purpose, that what they are writing can be seen by other students, used to educate others. Having students write in this manner requires that they attain a more specific knowledge of their subject matter so that their writing, which now has the purpose of educating a worldwide audience, is the best quality it can be. When a student is writing in a digital environment, their work is no longer within the four walls of a classroom, their work is global; it has meaning.

This global outlook is a key point of digital writing that comes back to community. Leigh Wright, an assistant professor of journalism at Murray State University, has been one to fully embrace digital mediums, going as far as to use Twitter (an online microblogging service) as a major platform for class writing. He has used projects such as “live-blogging” school basketball games and lectures from Spike Lee to teach students to tell a story in a concise manner. Let me rephrase that: you have 10 tweets, 140 characters each and a 2 hour lecture to tell your story. This project does not produce the same endless, mindless, pointless spam that Twitter is often criticized for. It’s a project that produced fantastic results because the students involved were given the three things that Dan Pink cites as being essential to creative solutions. The students were given autonomy to tweet about whatever they wanted within the event they were live-blogging. They were given a chance at mastery of writing quickly, concisely and in developing their own writing voice. And because it was live, online, viewable by the entire world, they had a sense of purpose. These live-blogging projects weren’t just for an assignment, they were for the world to see. (Tweet Me A Story)

The students in this experiment were thrown into a global community where ideas could build on each other, where they could combine all their tweets into one story, organized by a hashtag (a method of “tagging” a post on Twitter to make it easy to find). Where some students tweeted about the game, others tweeted about the fans or the food. There were no repeat observations, the students painted a picture of the entire event they attended, regardless of if they understood it. It allowed the students to engage a wider audience because their voices were so disparate, while still writing about the same events.

This is why digital writing is so powerful. It creates an environment where students care about what they write about. By giving them a measure of autonomy over their work, students have the freedom to expand their project in directions that might not have been thought of up until that point. It makes student work, suddenly of relevance to someone besides a professor, who already has a vast knowledge of the topic. The student is responsible to gain an additional level of mastery over the topic, for the purpose of educating their audience. It puts the teacher in the role of an educated critic, one who can encourage the student to move in a new direction or expand on a sentence they don’t realize has potential.

Digital writing also creates a system where in-person discussion is vital to the creative process. Because there is a lack of interaction via digital writing, the early stages of the writing process, that part where ideas are just beginning to form, are some of the most important. In person discussion allows students to build ideas and expand on them, growing those ideas in directions that wouldn’t be possible without running commentary from peers, bouncing ideas back and forth until the student has a starting place that they’re comfortable with. From there the student can move forward with research or writing, having the benefit of feedback as they write as well as when they are finished.

My own experience with digital writing has been one where I know my writing improves vastly when I’m given the opportunity to write online. Mine and my partner’s blog (www.gastropermaculture.com) will be going live in about a week. We’ve been hard at work, not just for a semester or even a few weeks, but for months, developing ideas through face-to-face discussion and over the phone. We’ve had to figure out what we mean by specific words, how we feel about a certain post or if we should move the blog in a specific direction or not. It was a long four months of discussion and early planning, but now we are posting.

Our blog has taken ideas from sustainable agriculture and brought them together with gastronomy to create a project about sustainable food systems; how to source, shop, cook, eat and clean both sustainably and happily. The ideas we expanded on are based off of the principles and ethics of Permaculture, an ideology that is normally applied to agriculture. The definition was our prompt, just like we would get when in a class, but we had to find it ourselves and look for the connection between our own ideas and Permaculture. We had to research definitions and opinions, find out if our ideas could fit within the confines of Permaculture. There was one particular night where we took a definition of Permaculture by it’s originator, Bill Mollison, and rewrote it to have the same principles but with food in mind. It took hours and we worked long past when we normally would have slept, but we had to figure out the idea.

There are still some early posts that we are working on that are best approached by working in the same room, discussing ideas as we write and by visiting places together. But there are countless other posts that we’ve scheduled out what we want on the blog simultaneously, so that there isn’t an influx of similar content, that we can work on separately, using the ability to work at a distance, while still working together. Almost all of this would be impossible with a normal form of print media. Digital writing allows us to incorporate video, podcasts, limitless color photos and interactive media. And because the digital world is always changing and evolving, we have the ability to evolve our content with it. A lot of research will have to go into creating this content and so we are tasked with sorting through mass amounts of information, between Permaculture documents, food documents and nutrition documents as well as connecting all these ideas for different posts, there is a lot of education for ourselves before we even begin to educate others.

And so this is an illustration of how digital writing can create an ideal learning environment. My partner and I were self-motivated (autonomous) with our topic, deciding how to approach it, what to write about, our audience and how to integrate to normally disparate ideas into something entirely new. We are required to master our subject matter, having to learn an entire new field, both technically and how to communicate some rather lofty ideas to those who have little to no experience in either Permaculture or cooking, while still retaining the attention of those who are well-versed in both. Much of this learning will happen as we write, sometimes requiring multiple drafts. And we have purpose. We passionately believe that what we are learning about, writing about and educating people about. We believe that it can make a difference for people, to give them a freedom over one aspect of their lives and make a positive change in the world.

Digital writing allows us to do that and it allows other students to do that as well.

Bibliography

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