Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Online Writing Instruction and a Point of Concern

A point of concern for me while reviewing Hewett and Ehmann's book is that it seems to relegate online writing instruction simply to interactions, whether synchronous or asynchronous, about students' specific writing tasks. Although they discuss in the chapters who these interactions can teach general writing principles as they address specific concerns, it seems to ignore other kinds of instruction that can and must occur online.

I'm thinking in terms, for instance, of the tutorials we experimented with in class last Thursday. I would find it highly prohibitive to teach an online course without such tutorials or other means to convey general principles of writing directly and afterward assigning and collecting specific scaffolded tasks that students need to accomplish and to which I can respond. Similarly, I would find it difficult to teach writing in an online course without engaging students in either synchronous or asynchronous discussion of readings, having them negotiate, abstract, or apply concepts of writing through their reading and discussion of it. These are writing tasks, to be sure, but they are not the sort that will demand revision and developmen in themselves. Yet these elements of instruction are ignored for an apparently entire focus on how to responds to students' written compositions in a process of revision toward a more comprehensive major draft. Although some of the concepts revealed in the book might apply to what I describe above, especially to synchronous or asynchronous discussion, it would have been useful to have these elements directly addressed.

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