Enhancing successful outcomes of wiki-based collaborative writing: a state-of-the-art review of facilitation frameworks

This state-of-the-art review research undertook a survey of a variety of studies regarding wiki-based collaborative writing projects and from this body of work extracted the best practices tenets of facilitation. Wiki-based collaborative writing projects are becoming more common in second language (L2) pedagogy. Such projects have multiple aims. These include, among other benefits, L2 acquisition, P2P learning, collaboration and immersion in new technologies that will inform the social and professional lives of the students. By mining a variety of wiki-based collaborative writing projects for the specific meta and secondary facilitation practices, the researchers were able to develop a general framework that will assist instructors of university or advanced high school students who wish to engage their students in such projects. The attributes of good facilitation that the researchers have isolated are by no means exhaustive, nor are they a guarantee of successful outcomes. These attributes do, however, provide a good starting point for any teacher or instructional designer who wants to provide an environment that fosters student satisfaction, motivation and learning.     

Information technology and collaborative writing: fundamental pedagogy and theoretical considerations

Abstract

This article considers how teachers working across three countries can create a collaborative writing environment in their classrooms. It reports on the first phase of a research programme conducted by university lecturers in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, investigating ways of developing teachers' expertise in the linking of information technology (IT) and pedagogy. It examines writing practices in the secondary classroom, in particular focusing on collaborative writing, and explores how this can be extended and developed through the use of IT. The research operates at three levels of collaboration: first, between the researchers involved; secondly, between teachers sharing their pedagogical expertise; and thirdly, between school students engaging in writing across the limits usually imposed by time and space. A fundamental hypothesis is that experienced and capable teachers of writing in different countries can extend their pedagogical skills through working together. Such collaboration between both teachers and school students has only recently become a possibility as a result of wider access to the Internet and the World Wide Web, on which it is eventually intended to publish results of the research, including examples of student work.     

Enacting anti-racist writing workshop pedagogies in an online,drop-in writing club for youth

This article documents the authors' modification and implementation of anti-racist writing workshop (ARWW) practices in the context of an online, drop-in writing club, Pens Out. We sought to understand how teens perceive writing practices that are not white-normed — specifically, centring relationships instead of prizing individuality, embedding choice instead of replicating one authorial view and observing writerly craft instead of errors. As white-identifying educators and researchers, we engaged in practitioner inquiry to understand how programme participants who live in a predominately white region experience these practices. We asked: How do attendees understand and describe experiences with writing workshop pedagogies that seek to de-centre whiteness? This question has become increasingly important as politicians in the United States restrict anti-racist educational practices and content. We used conventional content analysis to observe themes across five participants' semi-structured interviews. Findings indicated that participants' relationships with each other produced inspiration and reciprocity, writing expectations from inside and outside the club affected choice and risk taking, and observing craft multimodally encouraged sharing and reciprocity. What we discovered can help teachers and leaders of K12 writing workshops implement ARWW practices and increase allyship while discussing and questioning hegemonic ideals in K12 schooling.     

Supporting writing for assessment in online learning

This article explores some specific issues involved in online learning and assessment. It draws on data from a postgraduate course for professional educators, delivered globally online, and highlights the relationship between students’ online discussion and their written assessed work, arguing that we need to focus on both of these in terms of the writing demands they make on students. In so doing it utilizes a theoretical framework which conceptualizes writing as contextualized social practice. The paper illustrates the complexity of the rhetorical demands being made on students in these new environments of teaching and learning and, in focusing on writing, complements present approaches to online learning which have, to date, tended towards collaborative and constructivist perspectives. The article highlights the relationship between pedagogy, technology and assessment. It concludes with a discussion of the design of an online writing resource to support student writers on this particular masters programme.     

Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.     

Digital writing practices: a close look at one grade three author

This paper reports on the digital writing practices of a Grade Three primary school student as he used an iPad to plan, produce and share digital texts. The case study acknowledges that writing is undergoing a period of great change in many classrooms and works to show how a student author has interpreted and produced digital texts with new technologies. In particular, the specific practices, digital materials and literacy concepts will be explicated through analyses of two digital texts created by this author. This focus acknowledges the ways texts can be planned, produced and shared using multiple modes and media. These social practices and the wider learning opportunities afforded through the flexible and recursive ways students produce text have yet to be fully explored. This paper also extends current understandings about digital writing practices through its examination of the connections between and among multiple apps as an author crafts digital text.     

Doing academic writing differently: a feminist bricolage

This article emerged as the product of a collaboration between two individuals at different stages of our academic careers, one a beginning researcher and the other a senior academic. Written as an experimental bricolage, the article weaves together two main threads to chart our engagements with feminist research and with writing practices, both of which we envisage as forms of feminist praxis. The red thread explores feminist research as a continuous accomplishment in which becoming-feminist is enacted through our different research narratives. The green thread employs diffraction, as an experimental practice to undo the normalised practices of academic writing by weaving together various kinds of texts. In its entangled quilting of the red and green threads, the article foregrounds bricolage as an experimental feminist praxis of doing collaborative writing differently.     

Teaching narrative writing using comics: Delainey and Rasmussen,the creators of Betty,share their composing strategies as rich literacy resources for elementary teachers

The author explores how comics texts and writing practices are rich literacy resources for educators. Few studies report on how teachers explore such texts and practices in their classrooms. The author examines how drawing improves students' narrative writing and presents findings from a 7‐month case study of Delainey and Rasmussen's collaborative composing routines. Delainey and Rasmussen are the creators of the daily syndicated comic strip, Betty, an internationally published family comic strip that has been in newspapers for 20 years. The author explores Delainey and Rasmussen's collaborative routines and composing practices and provides parallel suggestions for classroom work.     

Responding to emotion in practice-based writing

This paper will consider the significance of emotion in assessment through reflective or experiential writing in the context of professional practice-based learning. It is based on a 12?month study conducted with undergraduate social work students undertaking what are referred to as ??reflective writing?? assessments. This form of assessment is a requirement in social work education and commonly used elsewhere in professional programmes of study in higher education such as nursing, business studies and education. Drawing on text orientated interviews with students and tutors this paper explores some of the challenges of both producing and assessing reflective writing. Drawing on debates relating to the assessment of reflective writing (Boud in Soc work Educ 18(2):121?C132, 1999) and the benefits of experimental or ??risky?? writing (Berman 2001), the paper offers some strategies for recognising and managing emotion arising from the inclusion of reflective writing professional education. In particular, it will explore the benefits of creating a space for dialogue which can recognise social, educational and historical factors, which influence individual students?? writing practices.     

合作写作--元认知支持应用于作文教学的尝试

英国学者Fiona Yarrow和Keith J.Topping创立的配对写作模式,是一种非常灵活的结构性合作写作体系,它以整合元认知和社会互动的方法支持学生的写作发展。其中,带有元认知支持的配对写作流程图,不仅能有效地提高学生的写作成绩,而且能激发写作兴趣,增强自信心及自我效能感,培养协作精神。因此,该研究具有较高的理论意义和实践价值,是一项极具创新的作文教改实验,值得我们研究与借鉴。     

Beyond records and representations: inbetween writing in educational ethnography

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field. We call this inbetween writing. By examining our own processes of inbetween writing, and drawing on the work of James Clifford, we have produced a nine-part heuristic of inbetween writing. We argue that the heuristic could be used in research methods education to highlight the importance of writing to ethnographic sense-making and knowledge production.     

The discourse of collaborative creative writing: Peer collaboration as a context for mutual inspiration

Drawing on socio-cultural theory, this paper focuses on children's classroom-based collaborative creative writing. The central aim of the reported research was to contribute to our understanding of young children's creativity, and describe ways in which peer collaboration can resource, stimulate and enhance classroom-based creative writing activities. The study drew on longitudinal observations of ongoing activities in Year 3 and Year 4 classrooms (children aged 7-9) in England. Selected pairs’ collaborative creative writing activities were observed and recorded using video and audio equipment in the literacy classroom and in the ICT suite (13 pairs, about 2-4 occasions each).The research built on the contextualised, qualitative analysis of the social and cognitive processes connected to shared creative text composition. Using an analytic tool developed specifically for creative writing tasks, we linked collaborative and discursive features to cognitive processes associated with writing (‘engagement’ and ‘reflection’). The research has identified discourse patterns and collaborative strategies which facilitate ‘sharedness’ and thus support joint creative writing activities.The paper discusses two significant aspects of the observed paired creative writing discourse. It reports the significance of emotions throughout the shared creative writing episodes, including joint reviewing. Also, it shows children's reliance on collaborative floor (Coates, 1996), with discourse building on interruptions and overlaps. We argue that such use of collaborative floor was indicative of joint focus and intense sharing, thus facilitating mutual inspiration in the content generation phases of the children's writing activities. These findings have implications for both educational research and practice, contributing to our understanding of how peer interaction can be used to resource school-based creative activities.     

Analysing argumentative writing

This article presents a framework which has proven helpful in analysing senior secondary academic writing from a linguistic and cognitive perspective, revealing a connection between those two aspects, consistent with a Vygotskian view of the development of thinking through language. It involves a close examination of linguistic and cognitive features of students' writing for features of intentional design, which are borrowed from Design Theory, namely Contingency, Complexity and Specification. Writers' means of inserting their views into their writing is also investigated. The framework is given at the end of the article and annotations for its application and several illustrations are given in the body of the article. Its use is intended to assist teachers in identifying, very specifically, which particular aspects of a student's writing need attention.     

The other girls: Culture,psychoanalytic theories and writing

This paper presents a psychoanalytic theory of girlhood linked to a cultural theory of writing. It is a result of an ethnographic study of schooling, where the development of theory links to the immersion of the researcher in the research. There are two expansions of psychoanalytic theory. The first is a feminist poststructural critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis,with the possibility of the existence of a third or tertiary split, as writing eventuates. The second is an extended theory of mothering, through the complex relationships evidenced by girls to women and girls to each other. These theoretical developments are based on a theory of writing that is a poststructural theory of decentred graphics, which accommodates the phonic, the semiotic and the discursive. These theories, with their cultural implications, may be applied beyond the particular ethnography from which they come. In turn they designate knowledge, power, fantasy and desire.     

Collaborative writing assessment: Sowing seeds for transformational adult learning

The authors report on an interpretive case study that investigated how three elementary teachers summatively assessed their own students’ written work over a three and one-half month period. Their collaborative assessment sessions reflected their ongoing routines that created productive social spaces that sowed the seeds for transformational adult learning (Mezirow, 2000). The authors describe four conversational routines or structures of the observed sessions: group gossiping or spectating, reading/rereading, deliberating/reframing, and collaboratively creating. We argue that these dialogical structures promoted thoughtful grading practices and encouraged instances of objective reframing of beliefs and assumptions about writing pedagogy and assessment; these collaborative sessions became fertile ground for the teachers’ professional growth. Instances of such reframing suggest the potentially powerful nature of collaborative grading practices. We conclude that a sociocultural and social constructivist theoretical framework for assessment involving social protocols for assessment of written work can be beneficial for teachers’ professional development and confidence in assessment.     

Academic writing as shaping and re-shaping

Academic writing, especially the writing of research articles, dissertations and theses, is often viewed in the literature as ‘writing up’. It is as if first comes the research, an active creation of new knowledge, and then comes the writing, a relatively passive assembling of what has already been achieved. It is as if researching and writing were two entirely separate processes. Alternatively we may choose to conceive of academic writing as a set process which overlaps considerably with researching itself and, indeed, which may contribute dynamically to knowledge making. This article outlines some of the ways in which we may re-conceptualize academic writing as a more dynamic set of activities and practices. This includes a consideration of, for example, academic writing as constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge, connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting concepts, describing and re-describing our views of the world, as well as shaping, mis-shaping and reshaping ideas.     

Collaborative writing as a bridge from peer discourse to individual argumentative writing

Reading and Writing - Converging evidence indicates that argumentative thinking and writing are promoted by peer discourse. Here it is proposed that collaborative writing can serve as a bridge from...     

Employing Wikipedia for good not evil: innovative approaches to collaborative writing assessment

Wikipedia is an open educational resource that connects writers and editors to diverse discourse communities around the world. Unwarranted stigma is attached to the use of Wikipedia in higher education due to fears that students will not pursue rigorous research practices because of the easy access to information that Wikipedia facilitates. In studies referred to in this paper, undergraduate writing students are taught about the need to interrogate any information they find on Wikipedia just as they would other online source material. They are inducted into fact checking, editing and creating Wikipedia articles as a means to analyse source material critically and to advance their research, writing and digital literacy. Meanwhile, in a postgraduate course in magazine studies, instead of writing essays, students are promoting Australian magazines and print culture by writing Wikipedia entries about Antipodean magazines and their editors. These courses experiment with new approaches to formative and summative assessment; promote group research, collaborative and participatory writing, writing across networks and negotiating discourse communities; and challenge students’ perceptions about peer review and the legitimacy of Wikipedia.     

Learning through collaborative writing

This article looks again at the dynamics of reading, writing and telling stories. It argues that working collaboratively can motivate writers in ways which encourage them to redraft their work purposefully and explicitly in pursuit of particular creative effects. It exemplifies ways in which knowledge about language at word, sentence and whole text level can effectively be brought to bear as part of a holistic approach to writing.     

Widening access to writing support: beliefs about the writing process are key

Abstract

Universities’ performance indicators for scholarly outputs depend on academics having productive and sustainable writing behaviours. Research shows that writing programmes can increase research output, but less is known about which writing processes are productive. A project was initiated at a university which widened access to writing support to include staff who were not included in these performance targets, but who might be in the future. Following a writing for publication workshop, 36 academics were offered a place at a structured writing retreat. The evaluation aimed to increase our understanding of participants’ perceptions of their writing skills and processes before and after the retreat using a transactional model. We found that participants’ perceptions of their writing abilities were greater than their perceptions of their ability to employ effective writing practices. Both scores improved after the retreat. This finding confirms that a structured writing retreat provides an environment and structure for academics to practise effective writing. It enhances self-belief in the processes and skills required to produce output. Widening access to writing support for academics is essential for success in performance-based systems. Writing support must provide opportunities for academics to develop strong performance beliefs by practising writing skills and productive and sustainable writing processes.