Seminar Description
Blogs and Wikis: Letting the Cat out of the Hat
Worth Weller, Stevens Amidon, Sandy Schaufelberger
Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
The emergence of internet genres present both a challenge and an opportunity for those of us who work in the academy. On the one hand, it is a challenge, because our students are adopting tools like blogs and wikis much faster than most of us who teach, and these tools are changing the ways in which our students write. If we don’t become at least marginally conversant in these technologies, we risk the degradation of our finely-honed abilities to understand, critique, and assess our students’ responses to communicative events—their texts. On the other hand, it is an opportunity, because genres don’t arise willy-nilly—they emerge because they meet immediate social and instrumental needs, needs shared by students and teachers alike. Furthermore, emerging genres are flexible genres—by becoming early-adopters of these forms we are more than mere users of the genre—we become part of the social process by which the rules of writing in these genres are established. We not only use the genre, we establish and revise its conventions, just as our predecessors did (and continue to do) with more established forms such as the academic research paper and the reflective essay.
In this presentation we will be sharing our own experience bringing Blogs and Wikis into our classrooms. We will keep our presentations brief so that at least half our time may be available for discussion with the audience.
Stevens Amidon will describe his experience using blogs in teaching a senior level writing course, Research Methods for Professional Writers.
Worth Weller will
Sandy Schauffelberger will
Worth Weller, Stevens Amidon, Sandy Schaufelberger
Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
The emergence of internet genres present both a challenge and an opportunity for those of us who work in the academy. On the one hand, it is a challenge, because our students are adopting tools like blogs and wikis much faster than most of us who teach, and these tools are changing the ways in which our students write. If we don’t become at least marginally conversant in these technologies, we risk the degradation of our finely-honed abilities to understand, critique, and assess our students’ responses to communicative events—their texts. On the other hand, it is an opportunity, because genres don’t arise willy-nilly—they emerge because they meet immediate social and instrumental needs, needs shared by students and teachers alike. Furthermore, emerging genres are flexible genres—by becoming early-adopters of these forms we are more than mere users of the genre—we become part of the social process by which the rules of writing in these genres are established. We not only use the genre, we establish and revise its conventions, just as our predecessors did (and continue to do) with more established forms such as the academic research paper and the reflective essay.
In this presentation we will be sharing our own experience bringing Blogs and Wikis into our classrooms. We will keep our presentations brief so that at least half our time may be available for discussion with the audience.
Stevens Amidon will describe his experience using blogs in teaching a senior level writing course, Research Methods for Professional Writers.
Worth Weller will
Sandy Schauffelberger will
posted by Stevens Amidon at 7:39 AM
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