No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Revisualizing Composition: How First-Year Writers Use Composing Technologies
Abstract
Reporting on survey data from 1,366 students from seven colleges and universities, this article examines the self-reported writing choices of students as they compose different kinds of texts using a wide range of composing technologies, both traditional (i.e., paper, pencils, pens, etc.), and digital (i.e., cell phones, wikis, blogs, etc.). This analysis and discussion is part of the larger Revisualizing Composition study, which examines the writing lives of first-year students across multiple institution types throughout the United States. We focus especially on what appear to be, at first glance, contradictory or confusing results, because these moments of ambiguity in students' use of composing technologies point to shifts or tensions in students' attitudes, beliefs, practices and rhetorical decision-making strategies when writing in the 21st century. The implications of these ambiguous results suggest paths for continued collaborative research and action. They also, we argue, point to a need to foster students' reflexive, critical, and rhetorical writing - across composing technologies - and to develop updated writing pedagogies that account for students' flexible use of these technologies.
... While all of these studies investigated the effect of using various platforms on the writing performance of learners whether individual or collaborative, most of these were conducted in out-of-class context, involved college or university students, and used technologies that may not be available or accessible in low-resource learning environments. Moore et al. (2016) emphasized the need to update writing pedagogies in order to address the behavior of the learners especially in using at-hand and emerging technologies. Although participants in their study performed writing individually, Hernandez, Amarles and Raymundo (2017) affirmed that the use of composing technologies such as blogs promotes virtual collaboration among learners, provides monitoring of learners' writing progress and enhances students' writing skills. ...
... Since some scholars are claiming that the use of the mobile phone enhances collaborative learning (Cress et al., 2015;Kiourmasi et al., 2018;Kukulska-Hulme & Viberg, 2018;Liu et al., 2018;Moore et al., 2016), the interest of the current generation of learners in using the mobile phone has increased. On the other hand, some studies (i.e. ...
... The infiltration of mobile devices in a low-resource environment (Irina, 2012;Chiverton, 2017) and learners' recognition of the significant contribution of the handheld devices in their composition poses the need for purposive integration of the mobile tools in the writing classes. Since learners are exposed to gadgets since birth (Montealegre, 2019;Moore et al., 2016), teachers of writing should prepare and train learners to be responsible users of these devices and to take advantage of their academic affordances, especially in writing. This also presents the need to equip learners with the technological knowledge and skills that include the use of mobile features and applications for both offline and online tools useful in writing activities, and promote information literacy and critical thinking which includes selecting, collecting, filtering, consuming, and injecting information from online sources for their compositions. ...
Integration of technology which includes the use of a smartphone is currently one of the trends in ESL writing classes. Particularly in collaborative activities, it is assumed that the use of smartphones contributes to the attitude of the learners towards writing and their writing performance as well. Consequently, the present study investigated the writing performance of ten gender-mixed groups who used smartphones as they engaged themselves in a collaborative essay writing activity. Likewise, through a focused group discussion, attitude of the learners towards writing was determined. Results revealed that the collaborative essay writing activity which used smartphones had a positive influence on the content, organization and vocabulary of the essay. However, no influence was seen in grammar and mechanics. Learners reported a positive attitude in writing in terms of affective, behavioral and cognitive aspects.
... As a response to Yancey's call for more research on the composing strategies of 21st century students, the authors of "Revisualizing Composition: How First-Year Writers Use Composing Technologies" (Moore et al., 2016) conducted an extensive study of the composition habits of 1,366 students from seven colleges and universities. Statistics cited in the article show that "[s] tudents regularly use a range of technologies when composing, but they-not surprisingly-use them for different purposes." ...
... In order to determine the preparedness of Macaulay students to use the Wordpress platform in their coursework, a survey was given to incoming students inquiring about their experience composing in online spaces prior to entering college. The data was compared to CUNY-wide and nation-wide surveys (Smale and Regalado, 2014;Lenhart, 2015;Moore et al, 2016), which found similar results: while many students have personal social media accounts, and there is an increase in exposure to digital technologies at the 9-12 grade level, most students have diffi culty applying their digital literacy skills at the college level. As Moore et al. argue, "Even though the nature of texts, textuality, textual production and reception, and the writing lives of students have changed drastically, we are, as Yancey (2009) claimed, still teaching writing like we taught it 100 years ago" (2016). ...
... This percentage confi rms that just as nation-wide research (Moore et al., 2016;boyd, 2014) and the CUNY-specifi c research (Smale and Relgalado, 2014) indicates, Macaulay students write on social media sites, whether they are conscious of the implications of that practice or not. The majority of respondents in this survey indicate that they have a Facebook account; Facebook is a social media site (founded in 2004) available to anyone over the age of thirteen who agrees to the terms and conditions. ...
Online writing instruction is a process of design that includes both spatial and temporal dimensions. Ideally, this process brings together design and pedagogy to move students through their online writing work successfully. Institutionally mandated LMS platforms often constrain this process. This article establishes three design principles and concepts for designing learning environments that take into account both space and time as designed elements of online classes. Applying the principles of backward design, modular content, and student choice to course design can help instructors design more thoughtful, participatory classes centered on student learning and instructor presence.
... Wikis provide a more flexible space where writers can co-author and discuss the creation of content. For example, in a cross-campus study on student use of writing technologies, students mostly understood wikis as a classroom technology for writing papers (Moore et al., 2016). Though the power of wikis lies in the affordances for networked interactions, we often approach these spaces statically, using the traditional page as our working metaphor. ...
... These types of texts generate content through the relationships they form with other texts. They are built through networked interactions between users and writers (Moore et al., 2016). Although this may be true in many cases, most of the innovation in these spaces stems from the networked interactions between users and writers. ...
In recent years, content creators and academics in online creator culture have re-imagined how we take notes using digital spaces like Roam Research, Notion, Obsidian, and Craft Docs. Though developers and users refer to these spaces as project or personal knowledge management systems, these digital spaces are a new kind of Content Management System (CMS), or wiki, at their core. These tools are no longer just about collecting and organizing information but cultivating new connections for ideation and content creation, both personally and collaboratively. This means downplaying or ridding these spaces of the folder interface and actively hyperlinking individual notes to be fluidly rearranged and connected in new ways. New CMS writing spaces like Roam Research, Notion, Obsidian, and Craft Docs have taken this strategy to a new level by incorporating more hypertext tools, like backlinks and knowledge graphs. This not only allows researchers and writers to cultivate new ideas but enhances content generation, helping researchers and writers renew the process of coming up with new ideas and manage the massive amount of information flow in the twenty-first century.
... In ways similar to the attention and rise of Web 2.0 composition strategies including blogs, social media, and wikis in the late 00s and early teens, the incorporation and deployment of wearables in the composition classroom has not gone unnoticed, particularly by computers and writing scholars. The diverse array of approaches to wearables has included their use in peer review (Tham, 2017), invention strategies (Duin, Moses, McGrath, & Tham, 2016), technical communications (Tham, 2015), and social media (Moore et al., 2016) amongst other approaches. While these approaches have proven to be fruitful, they all position the wearable as separate from the actual composing process, an aid or tool to be consulted before or after the composition. ...
... Jessie L. Moore et al. (2016) come to a similar conclusion in their survey of using traditional and digital technologies in the classroom. While Moore et al. do not discount traditional forms of composing such as pen and paper and word processing programs, they emphasize that the future is becoming increasingly digital. ...
This article examines the rise in popularity of wearables and their intersection with mobile gaming to identify their potential for composing non-discursive, multimodal texts in writing classrooms. Using play and creative misuse as compositional strategies, I argue that the recent shift away from personal computers as the main way of producing texts offers the potential for teachers to increase the digital literacy of their students. The main roadblock to such a literacy is conspicuous computing, which I define as the phenomenon of wearables designed with a remediated display that attempts to obfuscate its actual computing processes. Disrupting conspicuous computing can lead to social, cultural, and political critiques as evidenced through two real-world examples where users integrate play into their composing process to produce expressive and persuasive texts. As students begin to view the wearables they use in their everyday life as productive mediums instead of passive consumer devices, this can lead to a more critical understanding of the networked, multimodal, and digital worlds they inhabit.
... Supporting this idea, Moore et al. (2016) also point out in their survey of 1366 first year composition students in American universities that over 90.1 % students used Twitte for a range of literate practices. This sentiment is also reflected in Holmes and Lussos (2018) who analyze the "unique rhetorical affordances of Twitter bots as a way to offer student writers the kairotic means of understanding how networked writing functions in social media public spheres" (p.118). ...
In this paper, we demonstrate how studying the rhetorics of ChatGPT prompt writing on social media can promote critical AI literacies. Prompt writing is the process of writing instructions for generative AI tools like ChatGPT to elicit desired outputs and there has been an upsurge of conversations about it on social media. To study this rhetorical activity, we build on four overlapping traditions of digital writing research in computers and composition that inform how we frame literacies, how we study social media rhetorics, how we engage iteratively and reflexively with methodologies and technologies, and how we blend computational methods with qualitative methods. Drawing on these four traditions, our paper shows our iterative research process through which we gathered and analyzed a dataset of 32,000 posts (formerly known as tweets) from X (formerly Twitter) about prompt writing posted between November 2022 to May 2023. We present five themes about these emerging AI literacy practices: (1) areas of communication impacted by prompt writing, (2) micro-literacy resources shared for prompt writing, (3) market rhetoric shaping prompt writing, (4) rhetorical characteristics of prompts, and (5) definitions of prompt writing. In discussing these themes and our methodologies, we highlight takeaways for digital writing teachers and researchers who are teaching and analyzing critical AI literacies.
... Learning methods are changing rapidly due to the widespread use of technology as a means of support. Academic writing is one of the English language skills that learners use technology to improve (Moore et al., 2016). One technological means learners use is Artificial intelligence (AI). ...
... It is also worth noting that the digital age is changing how students improve their writing skills, and teachers are utilizing new tools that aid in pedagogy in a variety of ways. Because of the rise of new technology and the internet, students' writing habits in academic writing and language acquisition are changing (Moore et al., 2016;Peters & Cadieux, 2019). Technology in today's globalized world witnesses many digital advancements including AI. AI and natural language processing result in increasingly sophisticated language and writing tools (Geitgey, 2018;Heaven, 2020). ...
Paraphrasing, being an essential component of academic writing skills, poses a challenge for EFL students. It requires motivation through integration of technology and artificial intelligence-mediated tool like QuillBot to address the issue. QuillBot, the online artificial intelligence tool, has the potential to assist and motivate students to improve their paraphrasing skills. This study, to address the scarcity of the available literature especially in Najran University context, aims to examine EFL students' motivation using QuillBot to improve their paraphrasing skills. To achieve the study objectives, the descriptive-diagnostic research design was followed. One hundred two students registered in Technical Writing course were the participants to respond to a questionnaire and semi-structured interview questions. The study explores whether there is any significant difference in the participants’ responses in terms of their gender. The results revealed that QuillBot highly motivated students to improve their paraphrasing skills from their point of view. Also, it was shown that gender influenced the respondents' answers in favor of females. Additionally, the content analysis showed that technology-mediated classrooms, personal digital gadgets, easy access to software and internet applications, proper guidance (how to use the AI tool to solve the paraphrasing exercises of the syllabus) to use AI etc. are factors that highly motivate EFL students to utilize QuillBot in improving their paraphrasing skills. The potential implications of these resources are to make writing classes more enjoyable, engaging, interactive, productive, and lively for students. Based on the findings, the study suggests EFL teachers use QuillBot to enhance paraphrasing skills, inspire students, adapt teaching methods to technology, while future research is recommended to explore essay and summary writing.
... It is also worth noting that the digital age is changing how students improve their writing skills, and teachers are utilizing new tools that aid in pedagogy in a variety of ways. Because of the rise of new technology and the internet, students' writing habits in academic writing and language acquisition are changing (Moore et al., 2016;Peters & Cadieux, 2019). Technology in today's globalized world witnesses many digital advancements including AI. AI and natural language processing result in increasingly sophisticated language and writing tools (Geitgey, 2018;Heaven, 2020). ...
... The digital age is changing the way we learn and brings with it new tools that can support us in many ways. In the field of academic writing and language learning, students' writing habits are changing due to the rise of new technologies and the Internet (Moore et al., 2016;Peters & Cadieux, 2019). Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing lead to language and writing tools, that become increasingly powerful (Geitgey, 2018;Brown et al., 2020;Heaven, 2020). ...
Due to the advances of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, new kinds of Internet-based writing tools have emerged. Among other things, these AI-powered writing tools can be used by students for text translation, to improve spelling or for rewriting and summarizing texts. On the one hand, they can provide detailed recommendations for the adaptation of text elements within seconds. On the other hand, they also produce inconsistencies and errors, that students might not be aware of. How to deal with these tools in an educational context is a difficult question. Since writing tools are usually used unsupervised and without further instructions, students may need guidance from the teacher in interacting with those tools, to prevent the risk of misapplication. To better understand this underlying issue, the paper at hand uses survey data of 365 freshmen students to describe and analyze student perceptions of AI-powered writing tools. Regarding AI-powered writing tools, different student types were identified by using the k-means clustering method. The results suggest that students have different attitudes towards AI-powered writing tools. Some students may use them in an unreflective, non-sceptical way, which can lead to (un)voluntary plagiarism. Other students may not use writing tools at all, partly because they are sceptic, but also because they may lack meaningful learning strategies in general (course repeaters). Depending on the different student types, individualized teaching strategies might be helpful to promote or urge caution in the use of these tools.
... University students writing habits have changed drastically with the event of technology and the web (Moore et al., 2016). In general, they have become deeply dependent of the web when it comes to researching information and almost stopped reaching university libraries. ...
With the quick proliferation of technologies in developing learning, promoting students' digital learning skills has become a prominent issue in the existing educational discourse. To explore this new role of technology in facilitating the access to information. The present study investigates Moroccan university students' perceptions regarding their level of digital informational, writing and referencing skills and knowledge of plagiarism. Based on a quantitative descriptive design and using an adapted survey questionnaire, the data were collected from a convenience sample of n=204 students graduating from Moroccan universities. The findings have revealed that the majority of respondents are unfamiliar and less efficient with digital informational and referencing skills and have less technical knowledge with bibliographic data management softwares. Moroccan university students would benefit from being taught these strategies in order to develop better writing habits and learn how to write without plagiarizing. .
... The pervasiveness of social media use has been followed by a rise in pedagogies across higher education that use networked tools to foster community building, deliberation, discussion, and critical sharing and analysis (Greenhow & Lewin, 2016;Van Den Beemt, Thurlings, & Willems, 2019;Tess, 2013). Scholars in rhetoric and writing studies have outlined numerous strategies for augmenting the composition classroom with social media tools (Walls & Vie, 2017;Buck, 2015;Daer & Potts, 2014;Faris, 2017;Shepherd, 2015;Moore et al., 2016;Yancey, 2009). Stephanie Vie (2008Vie ( , 2018 has identified networked tools and communities as a valuable site in which to teach students critical digital literacies, and Liza Potts (2017) argues that networked technologies, including social media tools, should be considered a significant site of practice and research for the digital rhetoric classroom (106). ...
This article examines the “Rules” documents accompanying three networked discussion communities. The three networked communities— r/AmITheAsshole, r/SandersForPresident, and r/PoliticalDiscussion on the popular discussion platform Reddit— all engage rhetorical sensibilities of decorum, metadiscourse, and telos in different but compelling ways. As writers in structured networked communities compose with community guidelines documents such as subreddit “Rules” and platform-wide notions of ‘Reddiquette’ in mind, they attune themselves to rhetorical sensibilities of decorum, metadiscourse, and telos, and in doing so help foster environments of networked agonism and public community deliberation. This article concludes by offering future prospects for networked agonism, including suggesting how rhetorical sensibilities conveyed in “Rules” documents can inform other networked environments, understandings of rhetorical invention, and rhetoric and composition pedagogies.
... Students compose on mobile devices but rarely receive direct instruction on composing for mobile devices. Moore et al. (2016) found that "students used cell phones to compose a variety of genres that they identified as most often composed or most valued (85.8% across all genres)" and "their usage of cell phones jumped when we consider only the genres they compose most often (97.6% for the most often used genre, which is not surprising given that 'texts (SMS/cell)' was the most frequently composed genre)" (p. 5). ...
Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.
... Aimee Mapes and Amy Kimme Hea's (2018) longitudinal research at the University of Arizona named laptops as the dominant writing technology supporting students' literacy work and noted the ubiquitous and emotionally fraught use of cell phones for reading and analysis. My research with the Revisualizing Composition workgroup has similarly shown that university students across different institution types, geographical regions, races, and genders report text messaging done on cell phones as their most frequent and valued writing practice, though with reservations about how this writing is valuable (Moore et al., 2016;Pigg et al., 2014). The writing done on mobile technologies often takes place in short incremental bursts throughout a day, 8 often momentarily interrupting other activities (including listening to classroom lectures). ...
... Despite conventional wisdom that young adults have been engaging in a mass Facebook exodus for years, and despite the growth of these adults' uses of other platforms, the percentage of young adults who use Facebook is still high. 2 Given Facebook's juggernaut status, many of our students are on the site: Studies of college students' use show the overwhelming majority use Facebook, and half use it in our classrooms (Moore et al., 2016;Shepherd, 2016). Yet we need a more nuanced understanding of how our students construct themselves within social networks, Facebook included. ...
This study of two college students’ writing on Facebook demonstrates how participants experiment with writing identities on the social network site. Both users describe the persona options available to them on Facebook as limited yet engage in varied rhetorical experiments to achieve their intended personae. Through an analysis of data gathered in an interview with each participant and screenshots of each participant’s Facebook page, I found that both users’ attempts at intertextual and interdiscursive composing practices demonstrate varied levels of success in their construction of digital writing identities. The article concludes with suggestions for how college composition instructors can teach students to understand intertextual practices across digital and academic writing.
... In the last two decades, university students writing habits have changed drastically with the event of technology and the web (Moore et al., 2016). They have almost stopped researching in university libraries (Biddix et al., 2011;Leeder & Shah, 2016) and have become heavily dependent to the web and Google when it comes to looking for information (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). ...
Max 150 words. If possible, please submit your abstract in both English and French.
When writing an assignment, most students start by searching for information online, which they integrate in their writing and conclude by producing a bibliography for the sources used. They use their informational, writing and referencing skills to do this as well as refer to their plagiarism knowledge to make sure their text is exempt from plagiarism. In this paper, we examined which skills and knowledge students feel the need to further develop in university to prevent plagiarism in their assignments. Professors were also questioned as to their perceptions of their students’ skills development during their pre-university studies. Questionnaires were administered in six Quebec Universities to students (n = 1170) and professors (n = 279). Results show that students feel the need for more training while professors expect students to have already mastered the skills and knowledge to prevent plagiarism. Recommendations are made on how to implement better training for students through a program approach.
Lors de la rédaction d’un devoir, la plupart des étudiants universitaires commencent par chercher des informations en ligne, qu’ils intègrent dans leur rédaction et terminent en produisant une bibliographie des sources utilisées. Ils utilisent leurs compétences informationnelles, rédactionnelles, et de référencement documentaire et se réfèrent à leurs connaissances en matière de plagiat pour s’assurer que leur texte en soit exempt. Dans cet article, nous avons examiné les compétences et les connaissances que les étudiants ressentent le besoin de développer davantage à l’université pour prévenir le plagiat dans leurs travaux. Les professeurs ont également été interrogés sur leur perception du développement des compétences de leurs étudiants durant leurs études pré-universitaires. Des questionnaires ont été administrés dans six universités québécoises à des étudiants (n = 1170) et à des professeurs (n = 279). Les résultats montrent que les étudiants ressentent le besoin d’une formation plus poussée alors que les professeurs s’attendent à ce que les étudiants maîtrisent déjà les compétences et les connaissances nécessaires pour prévenir le plagiat. Des recommandations sont formulées sur la façon de mettre en œuvre une meilleure formation pour les étudiants par le biais d’une approche-programme.
... The point Wolff is trying to make is that we must productively engage these various writing spaces and modes in our composition classrooms. Moore et al. (2016) actually present a little snapshot of the composing technologies our students use on a daily basis: "Notebook paper and pencil, word-processing programs, cell phones, and Facebook: these are just a few of the composing technologies today's students use to write in their everyday, academic, and professional lives" (2). Rebecca Tarsa (2015), a digital writing and rhetoric scholar, calls new forums of writing available to students "digital participation sites," which "offer a wide range of opportunities for deploying both digital and alphabetic literacy skills, and have proven incredibly successful in creating the literacy engagement that frequently proves elusive in composition instruction" (12). ...
... However, no one is too far outside the bounds of social media-just more practice and preparation would be required-nor are these skills exclusively achieved through social media. In the end, it simply is one composition instructor's attempt to acknowledge the call for writing instructors to find ways to make our classroom content relatable to our students' everyday lives (Moore, et al., 2016). My students' existing public rhetoric was my access point, academic prose was my objective, and social media was my bridge. ...
Existing scholarship has predominantly looked at transfer with the composition classroom as the primary location for writing skill development. Subsequently, composition scholars have theorized about and constructed courses around this developmental, classroom-centered setup, with multiliteracy and multimodality at the forefront of these applications. This article adds a new theory and application into the mix. By using the growing influence of social media, the author has adopted a theory of transfer in
which the focus is not about how the skills of the classroom can answer the call to the public and thus send students equipped and ready for a world of dialogue and symbolic meaning-making. Rather, the article focuses on the transfer of students’ preexisting public rhetoric skills, via social media, into the classroom, which then deconstruct with my students, through class activities and assignments, to show how these skills can be used within traditional academic prose.
Recently, the application of innovative technological solutions has revolutionized various aspects of our lives, and education is no exception. This study investigated the use of AI-powered tools and their effects on teaching and learning English academic writing skills. The research was conducted with the participation of 5 teachers and 60 students from five academic writing classes in two language centers in Hanoi. Data from the research were mainly collected through tests and questionnaires. Interviews were used as a supporting tool. The research findings indicate that teachers and students have positive attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI), and AI tools are beneficial to the participants at discourse, sentence, and word/phase levels. The application of AI-powered writing tools has a considerable contribution to the students in terms of cohesion and coherence, lexical resources, grammatical range, and accuracy. The study can be considered an informative source of reference for teachers and students who are teaching and learning academic writing, especially prospective candidates for standardized English tests.
This study explores the perspectives and experiences related to AI writing assistants for college-level English language learners, casting light on potential as valuable supports for language learning and academic writing enhancement. This study uses a qualitative design with narrative inquiry approach. The study was conducted with three English Language Learners in Magister program from one university in Malang. The two research questions were addressed by conducting semi-structured interviews with these students. The results of this investigation show that students' perceptions of ChatGPT were contradictory, with both positive and negative aspects swaying their perspectives. Moreover, the study highlighted factors among them academic workload, time efficiency, and affordability that affected the English language learner’s intent to employ ChatGPT as a writing assistant in an academic context. Regardless the numerous benefit such as instant feedback, grammar proofreading correction, expanding vocabulary, and language style suggestions, the incorporation of AI-based writing aids in academic contexts still faces ethical and practical challenges. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of these aspects can provide valuable insights for educators, enabling them to develop efficacious strategies for the responsible and sustainable integration of AI tools. These strategies aim to effectively facilitate language learning and academic writing for those who are learning English as a foreign language.
The purpose of this study is to determine how students might enhance their essay-writing abilities and how they respond to the essay writing GPT. Explanatory sequential research was used in this mixed method study to analyze both the qualitative and quantitative data in distinct steps. In order to conduct the study quantitatively, the researcher used 60 students who were enrolled in an undergraduate English study program at IAIN Curup, Indonesia, that included an essay writing course. With 30 students of experimental and control group. The test is validated by three experts from UIN Raden Fatah Palembang, University of Bengkulu, and UIN Fatmawati Sukarno Bengkulu. The results of this research are that GPT has no significant impact on students' essay writing skill. Experimental and control groups have almost the same score in essay writing tests. GPT has made students simpler to build the idea because they do not need to think harder like traditionally writing. Instead, the students who are in control group easier to arrange the structure of the essay as what they wanted.
We surveyed 803 undergraduates at a large public university about their online writing practices. We find that despite wide platform access, students typically write in a narrow range of spaces for limited purposes and audiences, with a majority expressing rhetorical concerns about writing in digital spaces. These findings suggest rich opportunities for writing instructors to better help students negotiate the terrain of online public discourse.
This chapter explores the author's experiences in writing instruction, from a middle grades (6-8) context in the United States, to experiences in higher education. The author uses the first-person pronoun to indicate a closeness to the work and explores the topic through an initial vignette drawing from instruction with international writers in 2017, followed by an ethnodramatic response to instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter concludes with implications and recommendations for practice as well as a final poetic reflection.
Drawing on action research, this article offers faculty a practical framework for selecting digital technologies when designing, developing, and delivering courses in online, hybrid, and face-to-face modalities. The article synthesizes findings from faculty interviews at
a teaching-intensive university, the author’s experience as a faculty member and faculty developer, and relevant literature to build a practical framework for selecting technology that is responsive to common faculty and institutional perspectives. The framework has already proven to be a valuable asset, helping faculty prepare courses across modalities during fluid conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic. To assist faculty in weighing numerous considerations when selecting instructional technology, the LEAPS framework
encompasses considerations that are frequently used and frequently overlooked by faculty. Consistent with instructional design principles and online course quality
assurance tools, the framework directs attention in technology selection to the analysis of learners, the purpose of instruction, student engagement, accessibility, and sustainable practices.
The failure to advance our understanding of intellectual rhetoric prevents opening up new avenues for rewriting the future through rhetorical technology. Rhetorical technology is the intellectual ability to use the power of empathy for human evolution through imagination and rhetorical data analysis. It draws attention to the fact that human beings can avoid repeating the same catastrophic events that their ancestors experienced with rhetorical data analysis. Within the context of this study, rhetorical technology has indeed a magical and intellectual power, and teaching empathy through writing and world languages can offer more sophisticated worldviews for humanity to evolve. For this purpose, it is quite futuristic and technological to treat writing as a resource for guiding the next generation to rewrite the future through empathy and technology.
Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.
Response technology (RT), systems where students respond with personal devices or clickers and teachers follow up on the tallied responses, has been widely adopted and researched in education. However, limited academic attention has been directed at the nascent text response functionality, which lets students compose their own responses rather than select from the teacher’s multiple-choice alternatives. This case study uses observations, teacher and student interviews, and extracted responses from upper-secondary language education to map the extent of and motivations behind teachers’ application of and students’ participation with RT text response. Teachers, wanting to engage and involve students in the learning process, asked formal, content, and personal/procedural questions, which students would largely (83%) make a genuine attempt to answer. Students, motivated by a wish to be involved and a desire for social and professional recognition, participated on par with multiple-choice participation rates reported in the literature (76.4% vs. 74.1%). They also provided meta comments on the learning process, responses resisting the intention of the question, and empty responses deleted prior to submission. This study therefore suggests that RT text response facilitates a considerable expansion of student-centred classroom communication, and should be further researched.
Purpose
This paper aims to recommend that English educators engage preservice teachers (PSTs) in thinking and acting agentively in twenty-first century writing instruction by prompting them to examine and (re)construct discourses around identity, beliefs and teaching contexts. It explores metacognitive interventions that supported one PST to assume agency to implement twenty-first century writing pedagogies that challenged institutional and curricular norms.
Design/methodology/approach
A case study design was used to explore how one PST enacted agency in teaching twenty-first century writing during student teaching. Data were collected from five stimulated recall interviews that prompted metacognition over a four-month internship semester. Emerging themes were analyzed using content analysis.
Findings
During interviews, the PST constructed narratives about herself, her beliefs and her teaching context in ways that catalyzed her agency to enact twenty-first century writing pedagogies in planning for instruction, framing learning with her students and negotiating with her colleagues. The PST perceived metacognitive intervention as a supportive framework for activating her agency to both “see” and “sell” (Nowacek, 2011) possibilities for implementing twenty-first century writing instruction in her first teaching context.
Originality/value
While most existing literature on teacher agency focuses on practicing teachers, this paper focuses on activating agency during teacher preparation. It draws upon theories of regulative discourse (Mills, 2015), transfer (Nowacek, 2011) and metacognition as constructs for agency to identify how English educators can prepare PSTs as agents for change.
This article reports on how a group of students describe their use of smartphones in writing classrooms. Based on 143 survey responses and 10 interviews, this study found that students often described their smartphone use as a reflection of their classroom environment. When motivated in class, these students used mobile devices as conduits for participation, accessing course materials, learning more about discussion topics, or writing notes. But when instructors failed to make course content relatable, understandable, or engaging, the students turned to their smartphones as sources of distraction. These findings encourage composition instructors to view smartphone use as, in part, a reflection of teaching methods and the course environments, rather than universal indications of students’ distraction or disinterest. And while many researchers have advocated for new course designs or assignments that account for the proliferation of networked composing technologies in university students’ lives (e.g., Yancey, 2009, Clark, 2010, Dryer et al., 2014), these findings call for further research to address how students’ access to networked mobile devices may require composition instructors to shift teaching methods and models, rather than solely course content.
In this study, we examine how students’ use of “loopholes,” in a weekly reflective writing assignment illustrates some strategies students use when navigating, and more specifically pushing back against, both implicit and explicit assignment expectations. In addition, this study expresses the import of opening the “blackbox,” or implicit expectations/procedures, of both the classroom and the instructor by comparing student resistance to how users modify and change existing systems, programs, or interfaces. Situated within current conversations concerned with how digital composition redefines literacy, such a comparison allows for us to examine the ways in which students assess the often implicit procedures and constraints we, as teachers, may unwittingly reinforce, as well as allows for an examination of how students exercise their own writing skills in response to written assignment prompts for low-stakes writing in new digital interfaces. By analyzing instances of resistance in their reflections, this study illustrates how students attempt to circumvent assignment criteria for their own purposes, especially in the case of personal and low-stakes writing, as well as how digital interfaces in particular allow for students to push against the boundaries of certain written assignments in unique ways.
In an era of rapidly changing software and hardware technologies, I posit the importance of teaching theoretical composing concepts, such as the “layer,” in preparing students to become communicators capable of composing in multiple media, those present and those yet to emerge. Digital literacy instructors face the challenge of teaching students to compose in the technologies currently available, while also supporting students’ future literacy acquisition in technologies that do not yet exist. Focusing on broad digital composing processes and theoretical concepts such as the layer provides a means of preparing students to consider composing for wearable devices and other technologies that continue to emerge. In this article, I explore the use of one Augmented Reality (AR) software as a means of supporting students composing AR, as well as becoming familiar with concepts relevant to other composing occasions. I present a scaffolded process involving analysis and composition, focusing instruction and discussion on the composing concept of the layer. Throughout I emphasize how the concept of the layer extends beyond the visual layers of AR to a composing strategy and thus supports composers developing critical media awareness and adaptability for approaching multiple, potentially unfamiliar, media in current and future contexts.
Extending previous research (Cunningham, 2014), which investigated social network site (SNS) comments composed in digital African American Language (DAAL), this research analyzes text messages composed among three, male DAAL interlocutors. This study draws from grounded theory, content analysis, digital language (DL) research, and linguistics scholarship on African American Language (AAL) in order to examine the patterns and frequencies of AAL and DL features found among 380 text messages. Comparing the text message results to Cunningham (2014)’s SNS findings, this study suggests significant ways that DAAL follows predictable, identifiable, and similar linguistic and paralinguistic patterns.
Drawing on theory that positions writing as a social process, this study compares how two distinct contexts influenced the linguistic features of college students’ writing over time. In one context, students blogged and received comments, while in the other context students word-processed and received no comments. Systematic qualitative and quantitative analyses of these natural language posts and comments indicated the bloggers used greater rates of cognitive and intensifying expressions in their writing over time than students who word-processed. These results suggest that the affordances of the context influenced narrators’ expressive writing over time. The current findings have significance for scholars seeking to understand connections between interactive media, writing processes, and audience, and for college programs across the U.S. that provide support for first-year students.
This article investigates the writing mode, multimodal aspects, and folksonomic elements of digital composition gathered from a WordPress-based ePortfolio platform.* Focusing on the student perspective, data was gathered through both surveys of first year students and text analysis of digital compositions in order to produce quantitative results that can be replicated and aggregated. This research demonstrates the impact of assignment design and platform affordances on student composition practices. Results show that incoming students do not fit the "digital native" myth, nor are they prepared to engage in digital scholarship at the college level without significant guidance and specific requirements that scaffold digital work.
This classroom narrative proposes a process for reinventing academic research and writing in secondary schools for the 21st Century. We build on Macrorie's (1988) I-Search paper, drawing on affordances of Web 2.0 technologies and culture, to initiate the iSearch 2.0 process. iSearch 2.0 consists of four phases: 1) messing about and trying on questions; 2) exploring and expanding the edge of knowledge; 3) publication; and 4) reflection and self-assessment. This new academic research and writing process makes it possible for students to investigate and try out possible research topics, actively participate in the social construction of knowledge, trace sources efficiently, create meaningful products, and distribute information (regarding both the process and products of research) widely. iSearch 2.0 allows students to receive feedback from broad publics during the process of research and also to utilise multiple methods and compositional modes for self-reflection. Assessment strategies for iSearch 2.0 can incorporate interest communities outside the school and should consider the process and products of inquiry.
The vast majority of people who use information technology (IT) every day use IT in textcentered interactions. In e-mail, we compose and read texts. On the Web, we read (and often compose) texts. And when we create and refer to the appointments and notes in our personal digital assistants, we use texts. Texts, as already a technology in themselves, are deeply embedded in cultural, cognitive, and material arrangements that go back thousands of years. Information technologies with texts at their core --- the blend of IT and texts that we call ITexts --- are, by contrast, a relatively recent development. To participate with other information researchers in shaping the evolution of these ITexts, researchers and scholars concerned with the production and reception of text must build on a knowledge base and articulate issues, a task undertaken in this article. We begin by reviewing the existing foundations for a research program in IText, then go on to scope out issues for research over the next five to seven years. We direct particular attention to the evolving character of ITexts and to their impact on society. By undertaking this research, we urge ourselves and others to play a part in the continuing evolution of technologies of text.
We examined the frequency of adolescents' use of electronic media (ie, television/movie watching, text messaging, talking on the telephone, listening to music with headphones, and playing with hand-held games) at family meals and examined associations with demographic characteristics, rules about media use, family characteristics, and the types of foods served at meals using an observational, cross-sectional design. Data were drawn from two coordinated, population-based studies of adolescents (Project Eating Among Teens 2010) and their parents (Project Families and Eating Among Teens). Surveys were completed during 2009-2010. Frequent television/movie watching during family meals by youth was reported by 25.5% of parents. Multivariate logistic regression analyses indicated significantly higher odds of mealtime media use (P<0.05) for girls and older teens. In addition, higher odds of mealtime media use (P<0.05) were also seen among those whose parents had low education levels or were black or Asian; having parental rules about media use significantly reduced these odds. Frequent mealtime media use was significantly associated with lower scores on family communication (P<0.05) and scores indicating less importance placed on mealtimes (P<0.001). Furthermore, frequent mealtime media use was associated with lower odds of serving green salad, fruit, vegetables, 100% juice, and milk at meals, whereas higher odds were seen for serving sugar-sweetened beverages (P<0.05). The ubiquitous use of mealtime media by adolescents and differences by sex, race/ethnicity, age, and parental rules suggest that supporting parents in their efforts to initiate and follow-through on setting mealtime media use rules may be an important public health strategy.
This essay recasts James E. Porter's topoi for digital delivery theory as a pedagogical heuristic that guides students to reconsider delivery throughout the process of composing a multimodal video in first-year writing. The article showcases students’ engagement with the fifth canon. It reports the findings from a pilot classroom study examining the affordances and limitations of the heuristic by three teacher-researchers, offers pedagogical implications, and presents a re-modification of Porter's topoi for different situated uses. Through examining students’ uses of the digital delivery heuristic for video composing, four interrelated finding strands were discovered: interdependency of the topoi and rhetorical canons, rhetorical and ethical use of multimedia resources, identification across differences and commonalities, and reinscription and norming. The article makes explicit the dynamic, interactive, and recursive nature of delivery in multimodal writing and resituates digital delivery as a composition theory and pedagogy for teaching multimedia composition.
This study investigated the claims made in the popular press about the “digital native” generation as learners. Because students' lives today are saturated with digital media at a time when their brains are still developing, many popular press authors claim that this generation of students thinks and learns differently than any generation that has come before, but the evidence to support these claims is scarce. This study used a survey to gather data on the technology use of university freshmen, the degree to which they identified with the claims being made about their approaches to learning, and the productiveness (in terms of focused attention, deep processing, and persistence) of their approaches to learning.Valid surveys were received from 388 freshmen at a large Midwestern land grant university. A factor analysis was used to identify meaningful patterns of technology use, and descriptive statistics, analysis of correlations, and extreme group t-tests were used to explore the relationships between technology use patterns and learning characteristics. The findings indicate some positive correlations between use of digital technology and the characteristics ascribed in the popular press to the digital native learners, and negative correlations between some categories of technology use and the productiveness of student learning behaviors. Overall, however, the small to moderate relationships suggest a less deterministic relationship between technology and learning than what the popular press writers claim.
User innovation is the key to the development and vitality of technology. As Huatong Sun wrote, “expanding the scope of localization practices and linking user localization efforts” to design cycles—including pedagogical design—will help bridge the gap between what teachers/designers create and what skills users/students need and want. This article theorizes the role of modern composition students and teachers as co-constructors of productive spaces for learning critical inquiry based on students’ statuses as digital natives. It focuses on a class of first-year composition students who reshaped an assignment to fit their own needs within the physical classroom and also enacted a shift to a virtual classroom. While doing so, they provided ways for each class member to individualize space within that digital environment, and they focused their project on examining the ways in which social networking forums colonize their daily lives. This article argues that by letting student innovation drive pedagogical practice—just as social media creators let user innovation drive the digital structures they produce—composition teachers can be assured of having a text for critique that blurs the lines between “private” student underlife and “public” classroom practice and legitimizes the creation of student-produced learning spaces. Using critical and cyberfeminist theories as lenses, this article draws conclusions about the future of computer usage in composition pedagogy based on students’ abilities to re-appropriate physical and digital classroom space.
In this essay, I explore one advancement in particular—the Semantic Web—and discuss ways in which it stands to change students’ interaction with information in digital spaces, and how new forms of interaction could impact the teaching of writing. I go back to the earliest days of the Web in order to remind readers how information retrieval has evolved in the digital age. I also provide a general discussion of the vision, current state, and possible futures of the Semantic Web, and I focus on how the Semantic Web might alter the research process and, more importantly, the research-writing relationship. I also offer suggestions for teaching composition in advance of and for the Semantic Web. Although the Semantic Web is still several years off, I contend that research and writing will merge into a single process, thus presenting new opportunities for the teaching of writing then and, perhaps more importantly, now. These opportunities include helping students to identify the challenges of information retrieval and overload, to see research as more about establishing links and connections between information sources and less about finding the “right” sources, and to write for the Semantic Web—and, in doing so, teach students that researching and writing are inseparable.
This article offers a theoretical framework for ‘digital underlife’: the distal and potentially transgressive discursive activities proliferated by emerging technologies. Digital underlife is an adaptation of sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of underlife, which figured centrally in Robert Brooke's well-known study of writing activity in 1988. As emerging digital technologies fray the communicative bounds of traditional sites for teaching and learning, such as the classroom and the conference hall, we are confronted anew with a complex array of possibilities for giving and getting attention. Drawing on the work of Charles Moran and Richard Lanham, this article calls for a more receptive disposition toward the productive dimensions of digital underlife. The article promotes a stance that imagines productive digital underlife to be intrinsic to curricula that combine digital writing activity and rhetorical education, rather than short-selling digital underlife as mere distraction, as an impediment to learning, or worse, attempting to banish it altogether.
Our vision for the future of composition focuses on the “tube” and the culture inspired by online video sharing. Understanding composition in 2020 requires further theorizing about the participatory practices occurring in online video culture. Based on practices found on the platform YouTube, we turn to the term “tubing” to explain phenomena taking place there, and we put forward the concept of “participatory pedagogy” that we see emerging in 21st century classrooms. The ubiquitous and historically loaded “tube” (noun) and its YouTube-specific counterpart “tubing” (verb), explain many of the shifts taking place as acts of writing expand to include participation in online video sharing. Other scholars have forwarded the notion of “postpedagogy” (Vitanza, 1991; Davis, 2000; Arroyo, 2003, 2005; Rickert, 2007), which places a high value on invention, encourages the playful, yet serious linking of disparate historical figures, and opens up new pathways that we see as working in tandem with what George Siemens (2005) called a “pedagogy of participation,” an offshoot of what Henry Jenkins named “participatory culture” (2009). Using tubing as a guiding metaphor, we develop our version of “participatory pedagogy” for 2020 by focusing on the propagation of Internet memes and the inventional possibilities found in the everyday practices of video culture, which create an historical archive, an untapped repository of cultural patterns, and a light yet ruthlessly public demand for participation.
This paper reports qualitative findings from a study that investigated Australian university staff and students’ perceptions and use of current and emerging technologies both in their daily lives and in teaching and learning contexts. Forty-six first-year students and 31 teaching and support staff from three Australian universities took part in interviews and focus groups. This paper examines how students and staff reported on their use of new technologies in their daily lives, their stated reasons for using those technologies, and their beliefs about the benefits and limitations of using technologies as teaching and learning tools. The findings question assumptions that have been made about a “digital divide” between “digital native” students and their “digital immigrant” teachers in higher education today, suggesting we need to develop a more sophisticated understanding about the role technologies play in the lives of both students and staff. A better understanding of student and staff perspectives will allow for more informed decisions about the implementation of educational technologies in today’s higher education institutions.
This article reports key findings from the first phase of a research project investigating Net generation age students as they encounter e-learning at five universities in England. We take a critical view of the idea of a distinct generation which has been described using various terms including Net generation and Digital Natives and explore age related differences amongst first year university students. The article draws on evidence from a survey of first year undergraduates studying a range of pure and applied subjects. Overall we found a complex picture amongst first-year students with the sample population appearing to be a collection of minorities. These included a small minority that made little use of some technologies and larger minorities that made extensive use of new technologies. Often the use of new technology was in ways that did not fully correspond with the expectations that arise from the Net generation and Digital Natives theses. The article concludes that whilst there are strong age related variations amongst the sample it is far to simplistic to describe young first-year students born after 1983 as a single generation. The authors find that the generation is not homogenous in its use and appreciation of new technologies and that there are significant variations amongst students that lie within the Net generation age band.