As teachers and researchers of writing and rhetoric in digital spaces, it is impossible for us to keep up with all of the changes in the emerging technologies, changes that seem to continually shift the ways in which we make sense of our everyday lives and how we communicate with one another ganze webseiten herunterladen. Nevertheless, the more we attend to the structures of the written discourse and the communicative patterns in IMLEs and other digital networked spaces, including an examination of both successes and failures of communication and connection, the more thoughtfully we will be able to help our students understand how to communicate and to connect to others through their writing in diverse situations and contexts with multilayered cultural and social implications office herunterladen key vorhanden.
I believe that this is particularly true in the case of very recent developments in online writing instruction. As I neared the end of this research project in 2012, a year dubbed by Audrey Watters as “The Year of the MOOC [Massive Open Online Course],” I could not help but extend what I was finding in terms of the importance of phatic and relational rhetorical moves in student writing on the Sharing Cultures discussion boards to a consideration of how even larger-scale MOOC-like IMLEs might or might not be productive for the teaching of writing mods herunterladen sims 4. At that time MOOC mania had not yet hit the writing classroom, and I noted then that many of the “xMOOCs” developed primarily in the US had course structures embedded in learning management systems that required students to learn things and take tests but not necessarily learn from one another bibel mp3 kostenlos. I was intrigued, however, by connectivist MOOCs, or cMOOCs, developed on connectivist principles of distributed knowledge by Siemens and Downes at the University of Manitoba because of their focus on generative learning fortnite downloaden chip. Connectivist principles hold that students learn through interaction with ideas and with each other, or, as Siemens says in his description of cMOOC, “We ask learners, however, to go beyond the declarations of knowledge and to reflect on how different contexts impact the structure (even relevance) of that knowledge…Learners need to create and share stuff.” In the ideas that underpin cMOOCs, I saw similarities to the ways students created (or did not create) their own personal learning networks through relational and transactional writing on the Sharing Cultures discussion boards aol mails herunterladen. I imagined, that if MOOC-like writing IMLEs developed or could be developed, they would happen in a connectivist model.
A few short months later, MOOC-mania did hit the writing classroom adobe creative cloud bilder herunterladen. Interestingly, the writing MOOCS arrived in x-MOOC form, not c-MOOC form. In her review of MOOC history and the distinction between x-MOOCs and c-MOOCs, Watter’s writes:
The terminology is very useful to help distinguish between the connectivist origins of MOOCs (and the connectivist principles and practices of open learning and online networks) and the MOOCs that have made headlines this year (with their emphasis on lecture videos and multiple choice tests) download samsung j3 keyboard german. While cMOOCs are strongly connectivist and Canadian, xMOOCs, as Mike Caulfield contends, exist “at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.”
This characterization of xMOOCs appears to be accurate vektor dateien herunterladen. Nevertheless, three institutions (Duke University, The Ohio State University, and Georgia Institute of Technology) received Gates Foundation grants to offer first-year writing MOOC classes through Coursera, one of the largest xMOOC providers, in Spring 2013, At the time of this writing, all three courses are in process msi afterburner downloaden.
The relationship of this study to these new first-year writing MOOCs, and any that follow, is ultimately one of data, methods, and a research agenda, all of which should have implications for writing pedagogy in online spaces overall. My analysis of the rhetorical strategies of student writers in an IMLE that spanned five project years and included 663 student participants demonstrated that one of the key factors to engaging students in a process of learning from each other is allowing the phatic and relational goofing off and messing around as students introduce themselves and get comfortable with one another. In the process of getting comfortable with 200 some odd people in this way, the Sharing Cultures students also selected their preferred interlocutors. Only after that process, in a large, required-but-not-requested learning space, did students engage in more substantive exchanges and those exchanges included frequent disagreement, mediated by relational moves toward alignment and identification. With these results in mind, I can’t help but wonder if and how the writing MOOCs will make room for this kind of sharing and what the student writing for relational and transactional purposes will look like in those spaces. As I wonder, I look to those writing MOOCs and I see a rich, potential data pool.
With that data in mind, the analytic approach offered in this study, which focused on how students successfully created social connections and engaged in learning from each other through their writing, might provide building blocks for a system of coding the complex interactions of online educational discourse. Ultimately, I propose that we, as a field, make use of whatever data we can from the writing MOOCs to develop a systematic theory of the written relational and transaction rhetorical strategies in IMLEs that lead to solid, teaching and learning practices writing in digital networked spaces.
