Putting 2.0 and Two Together


What We Do and Where We Do It

It seems that regardless of what the field’s view of this technology is (or becomes), there is a momentous swell of social and textual production outside of the academy that composition needs to more fully address, if not embrace. Perhaps more than any other time in recent history, writers (who are both students in the academy and users online) are approaching composition classrooms with a diverse set of collaborative writing experiences and, more importantly, a demanding set of expectations for their writing and communication instruction.

This trend, which Professor of Education Technology Martin Weller deems, “the expectations of students that have been raised in a Web 2.0 world,” is causing the divide between academic and social settings, or “traditional” and technological classrooms, to become even more pronounced (as cited in John Timmer, 2008).

Overlooking this sharp divide, I ask compositionists to look closer at the where of textual production and collaborative community formation; as student-users turn to social media like Facebook and Wikipedia, their ideas of terms like collaboration and text are increasingly being challenged by the traditional academic definitions of the same terms. Through a stronger emphasis of studying the spaces in which these definitions are being challenged, we can better gauge when to learn from this technology, and when to teach to the technology.
   
The first step in accomplishing this is to challenge the binary views that surround social technology use in the 21st century. Taking up Arthur Applebee’s initiation of the term “extracurriculum” within composition studies, Anne Ruggles Gere nods “to the fact that writing development occurs outside formal education” (“Kitchen,” 1994, p. 76). However,  merely acknowledging this writing-beyond-the-classroom is not nearly sufficient exploration for the 21st century.

As Wall posts become the new kitchen tables, and wiki articles the rented rooms, writing is undoubtedly the prominent activity online and outside of the academy. However, although Gere claimed that extracurricular writing “remains largely invisible and inaudible to us, writing development occurs regularly and successfully outside classroom walls” (“Kitchen,” 1994, p. 78), this is increasingly not the case as college campuses and classrooms view WiFi access as near-requisite, and students tote fewer spiral-bound notebooks and more laptops to their classes.
 
Our largest challenge moving into the 21st century is fighting against conceptual binaries such as either/or, us/them, or academic/extracurricular.

Providing one example, Ray Oldenberg explores the nature (and importance) of “third places” in his book, The Great Good Place. Situated beyond the first place of home, and the second place of work, Oldenberg’s third place possesses “the raison d’etre of…differences from the other settings of daily life” (1999, p. 22).

Oldenberg’s physical, third space is truly an “other,” an alternative from the trappings of the necessary or required places of life. In his catalogue, cafes, coffee shops, and hair salons all fit this description; but it is not too much of a stretch to see how online places like Facebook could also fall under this term to describe the area that student-users often escape to beyond their home lives in the dorms and workplace classrooms.

In fact, this confirms the redefinition of community as offering a sense of belonging to student-users. Here, a community’s purpose is not explicit knowledge production of “truth,” but of a sharing of knowledge within the community that is all at once activity, purpose, and product of the place. Like the close-up of a Wall conversation, interactions within third places undoubtedly create knowledge that can be transferred elsewhere, but their success is not necessarily hinged on the sole goal of producing knowledge. This is what separates current virtual third spaces from previous extracurricular groups of the past.

While well-meaning scholars like Linda Myers-Breslin, who calls us to “help students transition from their extracurricular, real-world communities to their academic or professional communities,”(2000, p. 165) espouse a view of binary, evangelical treatment of these groups beyond the academy, such treatment devalues whatever knowledge production and social collaboration that takes place on these sites by implying that it is not yet of a higher, academic degree.

This rhetoric of transition is problematic in that it propagates an “us vs. them” understanding of extracurricular writing. If we hope to take advantage of the wealth of collaboration and textual production taking place freely beyond the academy’s walls, we must rethink these notions of rightful place, and instead focus on the interactive spaces where useful activity and discourse is taking place. To do so it so honestly define what collaborative learning is in the 21st century.

The fact that these spaces need to be respected by authorities in the academy goes without saying, but in addition to our understanding and exploration, comes a very real need to shed light for out student users that these places and spaces may not be as autonomous, private, or self-owned as they may currently seem. In order to accomplish this shift of balance from learning to teaching, I make the final turn of this article to social geography, specifically informed by Nedra Reynolds’s Geographies of Writing.

Reynolds addresses textual production specifically within her study, positing, “Places, whether textual, material, or imaginary, are constructed and reproduced not simply by boundaries but also by practices, structures of feeling, and sedimented features of habitus. Theories of writing, communication, and literacy…should reflect this deeper understanding of place” (2004, p. 2). Indeed, Reynolds’s study could not exist without the theoretical idea of inhabiting or dwelling inside of a space; here, a textual space.

This space occurs both in public and private contexts, as Reynolds considers when she uses cell phone conversations in public areas—such as busses—as her example of this perception divide. “The public-private split, while illusory in several ways, is one of the most dominant paradigms about space in our culture, one that leads to notions of ownership…when a text is viewed as having an inside and an outside—with the audience, in particular, as a factor outside—writers can’t think of texts in terms of movement or exchange,” she writes (2004, p. 12).

This is a legitimate concern for claims that posts on a Wall are part of a collaborative community. After all, many posts are intended for one user to another, and so even though the space is public in nature—complete with an “outside” audience as Reynolds terms it—the textual production is intended as private, or at least semi-private.

This (mis)perception by student-users provides one of the best opportunities for compositionists to discuss the roles that ownership and authority play when there is the presence not only of a real audience, but also one that can contribute and collaborate on the text being produced.

Reynolds contends that, “universities are centers for learning but are also organized to keep many outsiders from feeling welcome” (2004, p. 141). In other words, we already inhabit well-established spaces of authority, ownership, and elitism that can inform our understandings of virtual spaces.

This inhabitation shares the idea that ownership of text (or conversation) occurs most strongly once people are inside of a space, where they may feel a sense of privacy, security, and community. In other words, ownership and the potential to collaborate—in some sense—textually seems to occur best when groups possess perceived autonomy.

This feeling of autonomy is not only important for shared perceptions of authority within a group, it may also be the first marker of potential for successful collaboration within a community. Anne Ruggles Gere notes:

Authority resides within individual members of autonomous groups because they choose to join other writers with whom they are friendly, share common interests, backgrounds, or needs. Autonomous writing groups depend upon members who are willing to give away, temporarily at least, authority over their own writing, indicating that they respect and trust one another enough to surrender their language to one another’s critical scrutiny. (Writing, 1987, p. 101)


Obvious feelings of shared-ownership, then, successfully commingle with individual desires to collaborate within a chosen community in these often-extracurricular writing groups. Indeed, Gere contrasts the autonomy of writing groups outside of the classroom with the semi-autonomous and non-autonomous groups formed and supervised by instructors; the chief authority figures within composition classrooms. Historically, autonomous groups have avoided authority.

It is ironic, then, to consider Reynolds’s findings from students asked to define their ideals of community. Receiving feedback from Leeds students, Reynolds relays many notions of home and independence in her students’ descriptions of their experiences in and around the college community.

However, while this may originally echo Gere’s autonomous groups of shared or ignored authority, Reynolds’s students advocate “the comforting presence of a police station nearby…desirable places to live are those that have a sense of community…desirable is what [a student] is accustomed to or familiar terrain” (2004, p. 106-107).

In other words, students in the “real” world sought out authority as an ideal component of their chosen communities. While discussing physical geographies, students continually returned to ideas of comfort, community, familiarity, and most interesting—authority. By equating the comfort of community to that of a nearby police station, these students reveal the very tangible idea that authority in the real, physical world is welcomed and often sought after.

People feel more comfortable near a police station in an unfamiliar part of town while avoiding the authoritative hovering of an instructor in a classroom, or refusing to believe that analogous authority figures exist online near the “home” of their personal profile pages.

As a result, as students continue to house their personal data on personal profile pages, take part in communities of friends online, and collaborate on open textual spaces within interactive web sites, we must all confront the contrasting perceptions of authority that exists in the physical and virtual worlds. While it may be taken as a given that collaborative writing in an authority-based composition classroom may be difficult, but certainly possible, we may need to explore the presence of authority in currently perceived extracurricular web sites that are increasingly becoming ubiquitous parts of our students’ lives, both inside and outside of the classroom.

Despite being available publicly on the Internet, many students still do not consider authority figures (such as a concerned instructor) to have the “right” to invade these spaces. Likewise, text they enter on each other’s Walls is in some sense owned in their eyes, and so should not be admissible in any judgment against them.

These conflicts of perception are merely a part of a larger conversation about extracurricular collaborative composition we should be having in the academy. It likewise sets the stage for the conversation with our student-users about what they consider collaborative within these spaces.

It may surprise no one to read that “85% of teens ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites,” (Amanda Lenhart, et al., 2008) according to a Pew Internet and American Life study.

However, the same study cites that 60% of those same teens do not consider these electronic texts as “writing” (Lenhart, et al., 2008). We are entering a time of momentous technological innovation and textual production, while also facing the fact that our student-users are not realizing that what they are doing in their own spaces are what we value in our academic spaces.

The solution to crossing this final divide involves instructors moving out before we invite others in. It involves avoiding the pitfalls of “searching for a single technology to substitute for face-to-face communication [that] misconstrues the problem. Rather, we need to devise an appropriate mix of face-to-face and other media depending on the work, its temporal sequence, the context, and the distances to be traveled” (Bonnie Nardi and Steve Whittaker, 2002, p. 102).

Student-users are seemingly already doing many of the things that we value and teach in our classrooms.

More than ever, instructors need to take on roles of advocacy and support, helping students realize—not their potential, but—that their current actions are valuable. In doing so, we are inviting them to teach us how this new technology can support collaborative composition. This allows us to use our expertise in guarding the academy while also participating as true collaborators with our student-users via new technologies.

Although most students today were born into Web 2.0 communities (with all of their inherent expectations and potentials), these student-users are no more natural heir-apparents to these spaces than we are to the academic hallways we inhabit. Both spaces require an often subtle set of realizations and agreements in order to be navigated successfully.

At this momentous time, though, we are being offered the fortuitous synchronicity of theory and activity, in that neither “our” academic communities nor “their” virtual communities could exist without textual production. Both sides offer their own set of experiences and expertise; it is now in our hands to further support the collaboration.