As I finish reading Because Digital Writing Matters, I recognize the need for us teachers to explore the affordances offered by the available social bookmarking technologies. While I have found some of them very useful in my day to day writing center instruction and my own research, I want to explore them more in the hope of integrating them in classroom teaching some day. In this post, there will a bit of rambling here and there as I narrate and evaluate some of affordances and disaffordances I have encountered working with some of these technologies.
Well, I came to learn about Zotero and Delicious after attending the 2010 summer seminar in Rhetoric and Composition organized by the WRAC Department. Dr. Patricia Sullivan of Purdue university did a workshop where participants did activities to explore the affordances offered by Delicious and Zotero. The goal of the workshop was to help teachers attending the seminar to think about how integrating these technologies in the classroom might revolutionize the way students conduct internet research; by helping students go beyond Wikipedia and GoogleScholar. This goal continues to be pertinent considering the enormous information students are encountering in the internet every day. Some of the concerns student-clients express when they visit the writing center seeking help with research papers, is information overload in the internet. Many struggle to keep track of the sources they find, or do not know which information is relevant to what they are writing about and which is not. My experience with these web 2.0 technologies has convinced me that, they can make both research and writing process a little bit easier.
In the past year, I have been playing around with Zotero and Ihave come to discover a number of affordances beyond the widely known social bookmarking tool. Zotero helps build your own library of the sources you find online. Because of its cloud computing affordance, you can share your sources with other scholars. Another useful affordance is that of tagging. As graduate student, it is very hard to organize the tonnes of readings we do online every day. Tagging not only helps me keep things organized but also makes me see connections on different projects I might be working on- when I tag sources based on themes or topics. The latest version of Zotero allows you to do in-page annotations even on the web resources by highlighting just as you would in a printed paper. In addition I can take notes and share them with others whom I allow to access my library. The affordance of creating a complete bibliography with a single click continues to be my treasured Wow factor about Zotero! I know there are many more affordances and I’m still exploring them.
Mendeley, which I accidently bumped into on my own, offers everything Zotero does and beyond. What I like most about this technology, is its facebook-like platform. This affordance allows you to build a personal profile with academic information like research interests, publications, institutional affiliations, news feed etc. People who share similar interests or in your field can find and connect with you and vice versa. Besides, it gives you an opportunity to see what everybody is reading by looking at popular tags. One great affordance that teachers can make use of is the group feature. Because of the increasing use of collaborative group projects in our classrooms, this affordance allows teachers to have students form online groups which can be private or public. Public groups actually offers another affordance of crowdsourcing were members can seek help, knowledge or expertise from others, even people they may not know. In these forums, they can brainstorm, share ideas, find sources and build a group library. Mendeley has a browser adds-on feature, web importer, which allows you to grab citations from reputable research databases like JSTOR. Early this year, with three fellow writing consultants used the Mendley's group feature to collaborate on a research project which we ended up presenting at a conference. However, Mendley does not have live chat feature like facebook's or like Convore’s. Hence people cannot converse in real time. Members have to be notified about any new communication from other members through email.
Currently, am exploring the affordances of Diigo, another social bookmarking website which allows users to tag webpages, highlight and add sticky notes. It is a great technology for those who do a lot of digital writing and e-reading.When technology goes wrong
With the cloud computing affordance, it is ‘assumed’ that you can access your (re)sources in the cloud (internet or company network). However, this was not the case for me when my computer was recently attacked by a virus. A whole year of my online library collection and notes disappeared in a flash of a second. Again this raises questions of how safe it is to download some of these free softwares. To what extent are they free?
Where Do I go from here?
It is my desire to integrate some of these technologies in the classroom or in some of the writing center workshops we offer like Research in the Internet and Plagiarism. However, I’m still thinking about ways in which teachers can do this without overwhelming the students further. Just as Devoss et al note, some of these technologies may seem to have simplified writing but in some ways have actually made writing in digital environments even more complex. By the end of this semester, I am sure I will have a found a way/pedagogy of teaching these technologies in a way that does not complicate student’s research and writing processes.
These are excellent questions you raise near the end, Esther, and they lead very nicely into the work we'll be doing next week.
ReplyDeleteEsther: I've been thinking about these questions myself. For instance, the other night when you called because you were having problems with Blogger, I was thinking about my future positions and similar calls. I can tell from our online interactions and the work on this blog that we're all fairly comfortable with technology. But what about the people who aren't comfortable at all? The people who may only know how to check their e-mail or the Weather? How do we use technology in a diverse classroom that brings digital natives and digital immigrants under the same roof? How much is it our responsibility to get them up to speed?
ReplyDeleteThe more I think about this, the more I begin to think about the word literacy and all of its meanings. I'm probably being a little too optimistic, but I'd like to think that using (and subsequently having to teach) technology is simply a process of developing new literacies and should be treated as an important process - one possibly on par with concerns like formatting and grammar which, no matter how hard we try, keep sticking around.