2003 Article Notes

From WolfWikis

A-G

Commentary: Wikis

by David Weinberger (2003)

Emerging Technologies - Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration

by Robert Godwin-Jones (2003)

• "Of course, the use of multimedia can change significantly the group dynamics of discussions, bringing into play as they do personal appearance and individual/local language variations." (2)
• "Such a system only works with users serious about collaborating and willing to follow the group conventions and practices." (4)
• "The goal of Wiki sites is to become a shared repository of knowledge, with the knowledge base growing over time." (4)
• "Wiki sites can be created for specific projects with a set group of allowable users and provide an excellent collaborative environment, since changes are logged along with identification of the author. In fact, a wiki-type site could be ideal for a "community of practice" (COP), such as the ESL/EFL "Webheads in Action". A COP is a way of achieving collective applied learning with the expectation that over time expertise in a given subject area is developed and solutions to common issues and shared problems are found, posted and discussed. A COP might use a variety of collaborative tools, but its goal is to expand knowledge and improve practice in a specific area. As our access to information has grown exponentially in recent years, efforts like COPs provide a welcome means to share in knowledge management, one of the great challenges of our time."

e-nough!

by Marc Pensky (2003)

• "Although the two are often conflated, teaching and learning are very different – teaching is done to people, in open view; learning is done by people and happens in the privacy and solipsistic isolation of each student’s mind." (1)
• "I’m going to suggest at least three reasons for this. First, we don’t always ask (or answer) the right questions about learning, or make the right distinctions. Second, our efforts to quickly direct research toward improving classroom teaching often lead us astray. And third, there are some old concepts and language that are just very difficult for us to throw away, along with some old common-sense truths that are very hard for many to accept." (2)
• "“Although learning can be understood as a change in an organism’s capacities or behavior brought about by experience,” writes Daniel Riesberg . . . this rough definition encompasses many cases usually not considered examples of learning . . ." (3)
• "More important,” he goes on, “it fails to reflect the many forms of learning which may be distinguished, for example, according to what is learned, may be governed by different principles, and may involve different processes.”" (3)
• "Human Learning is the set of processes people employ, both consciously and unconsciously, to effect changes to their knowledge, capacities and/or beliefs."(4)
• "Whatever its failings, this definition helps us remember that: (1) Learning is not one process, but several – sometimes separate, often interrelated. These processes can be enumerated, and associated with material to be learned. (2) Learning most be done by the learner – whether consciously or unconsciously – it can’t be done by a teacher or anyone else (3) learning involves not only “knowledge” (facts, groups of facts, relationships between facts), and “doing” (capacities tasks, skills and behaviors) but also “beliefs” (theories, understanding of how and why things work or happen), which are much less often talked about in this context." (4)
• "A great part of the reason is that there is so little theoretical consensus – scientific or otherwise – about what learning is and how to make it happen. And one key reason for this is that there is so little differentiation in the term “learning.”" (6)
• "While some researchers do study learning to find out how it works, the groups mentioned above study learning principally to “improve education.” (“Applied” research.) And since most of our education happens in groups (i.e. classes), what they are really trying to figure out is “how learning happens in groups.” Unfortunately, learning doesn’t happen in groups at all – learning happens in minds. And minds are helped best to learn in a one-on one situation." (10)
• "I actually think it might be more accurate (although certainly less elegant) to refer to these classes or groups of students, as “herds,” and to today’s teaching as “herding.”" (10)
• ". . . despite the fashionable but mostly meaningless noise we hear about “learning communities” and the fact that interaction with others is sometimes useful for learning, students don’t learn as much in herds as they would had they been taught exclusively one-on-one." (11)
• "Herding introduces all sorts of new variables into the mix that are not there with one-on-one, the most obvious being heterogeneity." (11)
• "Much, if not most of the actual learning takes place not in the lecture hall, but when the students are on their own, studying by themselves." (11)
• "Unfortunately tutoring – the one proven learning helper that works better than all the others – is left as the method of “last resort” reserved only for when you’re not getting it (read “dumb.”) Plus, to get this most effective form of instruction, you might have to spend more money on top of the sky-high tuition you are already shelling out!" (11)
• "This is the real opportunity of electronic teaching – bringing the benefits of one-on-one instruction to everyone."(11)
• "What we have done, unfortunately, is taken all the techniques that we have developed and fine-tuned for herding, such as lectures, demonstrations and tests, put them onto the computer, and assumed they would work." (12)
• "So I say “e-Nough!” To consistently produce true learning, which is what our “e-Learning” needs to accomplish, we will need to do much more. In addition to providing much more motivation through gameplay . . . we will have to take the tutor, not the teacher, as our instructional paradigm, and incorporate all those things that have been obvious to any good tutor for thousands of years: Start where the learner is, provide motivation, keep the tasks challenging but not out of reach, encourage questions, allow for lots of practice." (12)

H-N

The Individual and the Collective in Open Information Communities

by Philippe Aigrain (2003)

O-U

Phantom Authority, Self–selective Recruitment and Retention of Members in Virtual Communities: The Case of Wikipedia

by Andrea Ciffolilli (2003)

Take Back the Net

by C. Metz (2003)

Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments

by Mary E. Hocks (2003)

• "Visual rhetoric, or visual strategies used for meaning and persuasion, is hardly new, but its importance has been amplified by the visual and interactive nature of native hypertext and multimedia writing." (629)

• ". . . new technologies simply require new definitions of what we consider writing." (630)

• "Acknowledging this hybridity means that the relationships among word and image, verbal texts and visual texts, “visual culture” and “print culture” are all dialogic relationships rather than binary opposites.7 Recognizing the hybrid literacies our students now bring to our classrooms, we need a better understanding of the increasingly visual and interactive rhetorical features of digital documents. As writing technologies change, they require changes in our understanding of writing and rhetoric and, ultimately, in our writing pedagogy." (631)

• ". . . because modern information technologies construct meaning as simultaneously verbal, visual, and interactive hybrids, digital rhetoric simply assumes the use of visual rhetoric as well as other modalities." (631)

• "Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments actually offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important new pedagogy of writing as design." (632)

• "Any rhetorical theory works as a dynamic system of strategies employed for creating, reacting to, and receiving meaning. An individual author typically operates within multiple social and cultural contexts and, hopefully, advocates ethically for his or her audiences. Thus, digital rhetoric describes a system of ongoing dialogue and negotiations among writers, audiences, and institutional contexts, but it focuses on the multiple modalities available for making meaning using new communication and information technologies." (632)

• "Audience Stance: The ways in which the audience is invited to participate in online documents and the ways in which the author creates an ethos that requires, encourages, or even discourages different kinds of interactivity for that audience." (632)

• "Transparency: The ways in which online documents relate to established conventions like those of print, graphic design, film, and Web pages. The more the online document borrows from familiar conventions, the more transparent it is to the audience." (632)

• "Hybridity: The ways in which online documents combine and construct visual and verbal designs. Hybridity also encourages both authors and audiences to recognize and construct multifaceted identities as a kind of pleasure." (632)

• "Audiences can experience the pleasures of agency and an awareness of themselves as constructed identities in a heterogeneous medium. How that agency gets played out, however, depends on the purpose and situation for the text in relation to the audience’s need for linearity and other familiar forms." (633)

• "The design of the essay invites readers to think beyond the familiar linear structure, to playfully reflect on the self-consciously linear structure." (636)

• "In a space where multifaceted identities can be constructed, experienced, and even performed, this experience of hybridity works to the audience’s advantage by increasing the experience of pleasure through identification and multiplicity." (643)

• "Digital technologies can encourage what the New London School theorists call a multimodal approach to literacy, where using communication technologies engages students in a multisensory experience and active construction of knowledge. To use multimedia technologies effectively, writers have to use practices that are not just verbal but visual, spatial, aural, and gestural to make meaning (Cope and Kalantzis 26; Kress, “Multimodality” 182)." (644)

• "In other words, design moves us from rhetorical criticism to invention and production. The “shaping” of resources gives students’ work social and political impact and allows them to learn how to represent new forms of knowledge. To establish a balanced rhetorical approach, then, we must offer students experiences both in the analytic process of critique, which scrutinizes conventional expectations and power relations, and in the transformative process of design, which can change power relations by creating a new vision of knowledge." (644-45)

• "In terms of visual rhetoric, students need to learn the “distanced” process of how to critique the saturated visual and technological landscape that surrounds them as something structured and written in a set of deliberate rhetorical moves. They then need to enact those visual moves on their own." (645)

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