Maria's Reflective Introduction for Community Writing

Welcome everyone to my online course, Community Writing. After a summer spent thinking about this course, then thinking about it in terms of technology and online spaces, I have finally reached the point of feeling as if I have made more progress on this course. Specifically, I think transferring this course to an online space enhances the goals of this course as it better allows students to engage in critical thinking practices and write with the understanding of that writing can impact other’s thoughts, ideas and understandings. 

Upon reflecting on this course, I kept battling over this being a hybrid or strictly an online course. Finally, I settled with the course being only online. This understanding centers on the theories and thoughts of Gold, Gaver & Rogers. These theorists strongly impacted my understanding of teaching with technology and how technology can impact the space and then the community that is formed by a course. Specifically, Gold, Rogers and Gaver focus upon what the classroom becomes when one moves it from a traditional classroom with desks, chairs, and walls to a classroom with non-physical attributes, online attributes. These authors then theorize about the new space, the new "community" that is formed when moving outside a F2F classroom. Thinking about these points, it became clearer to me how an online space may better provide a more global understanding of thoughts, perspectives as well as give a space for an actual “outsider” audience to reside. This “outsider” audience I am referring to is an audience beyond the teacher and student’s peers in the classroom. Writing in an online space in a way then creates higher stakes and allows the possibility for students to begin connecting writing with a rhetorical understanding (writing for a real audience, writing for a purpose, writing for a situation, etc.). In fact, Gold builds on this understanding stating that by using blogs like BuddyPress the classroom as a network becomes “more open, more porous, and more varied” where the “classroom as a social network can help create engaging spaces for learning in which students are connected to one another, to their professors and to the wider world” (p. 76).

Therefore, when presented with the option of making this either a hybrid or an online course, I leaned much more heavily towards the online course. As an online course, I want to witness these anticipated transitions in student awareness and student writing. Additionally, I want to experience issues that may have not been issues in a F2F course and confront these with real solutions. All in all, I want to test my understanding of what this course could be and my understanding of how these theories can impact my course. Therefore, I anticipate that in the future, this course could potentially be created as a hybrid course. However, I first wanted to understand the strengths and limitations that an online space provides especially when talking about community. For instance, while I think an online space may provide excellent opportunities to understand rhetoric in practice as it pertains to writing, I do have my concerns that it may be limited in transferring the concept of “community” over. Often times in my F2F classes, the largest challenge has been getting students to identify a community that they belong to. As such, you will see in my schedule of activities and project descriptions that I spend the longest amount of time on unit one. Here students not only need to get familiar with working in an online space but need to get adjusted to understanding “community” and identifying one they want to work with. As such, we spend almost twice as long on that unit than the other units. Further, all the units have been slightly adjusted to be in alignment with MSU’s FYW program. I did this intentionally as one day I would like to actually propose and use this course at a similar university. Therefore, I had certain constraints placed upon me such as number of units and types of units. Nonetheless, I did slightly re-arrange the scaffolding of assignments. Particularly, I asked students to create a multimedia project for unit 2 instead of typically waiting until unit 4. I felt this was an important task to introduce early into the course because of the course being online and a place for multimedia to be engaged. Additionally, the task for unit 2 I think builds nicely upon unit 1 and begins to solidify student’s understanding of community.

All in all, I must say that I am pleased with this course overall but am well aware that there will be limitations to it. As such, I really do invite all of you to take a look at the website (course assignments and syllabus will be posted there) and let me know what you think. As you all can probably tell, I really do hold this course concept of “community” close to me and think it has a lot of potential. But before it being what it could be, I could use your feedback. Feel free to email me anything you may see at novotn10@msu.edu. Thanks much!