Jack Dougherty, May 10, 2013
Support from a CTL Fellowship in 2012-13 enabled me to write a set of essays that will be expanded next year into a multi-author open-access book, Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. My primary goal was to contribute to the scholarship of teaching by authoring reflections on web-based writing assignments in three of my Trinity courses: a first-year seminar, Color & Money: Race and Class at Trinity and Beyond, a mid-level core course, Educ 300: Education Reform Past & Present, and an upper-level research seminar, Cities, Suburbs, and Schools. Over two years, my students and I have experimented with a growing number of web tools — such as Google Docs and WordPress — to share, comment, and revise our writing with collaborators in real-time, and publish it for broad audiences. But the digital age also raises more questions about distracted learning, ease of plagiarism, and student privacy. While thoughtful blog posts and articles have been written on many of these topics, I could not find a comprehensive publication that brought them together for college educators, so decided to start writing this book, and to do so publicly on the web.
WebWriting is a born-digital book that encourages readers to comment and shape the direction of the work-in-progress (see http://WebWriting.trincoll.edu). During a September 2012 meeting of the CTL Fellows, I introduced the concept and facilitated a group writing exercise that asked participants to respond on a shared Google Document to this prompt: “As a prospective reader, what would you like to see in this book? What topics or questions should be addressed? What kind of digital resources would be valuable to you?” Building on these comments, I launched the first version of WebWriting in November 2012, featuring a handful of draft essays on themes such as “Choosing the ‘Write’ Tools to Match the Learning Goals” (with examples of crowd-writing and simultaneous peer review), “Balancing Public Writing and Student Privacy” (with the text of my course policy on this topic), “What Makes a Good Web Essay?” (with evaluation criteria from different courses), and “If You Build It, Will They Come. . . and Comment?” Posting essays in a web-book format allows me to integrate the main text with multimedia evidence, such as screenshots of writing samples, links to course websites, etc. Also, the book-in-progress runs on a WordPress platform with the CommentPress plugin, which encourages readers to share their views about the whole book, a particular page, or a specific paragraph. CTL fellows responded online to my draft essays prior to a very constructive discussion about the project in late November 2012. Their enthusiasm persuaded me that WebWriting addresses a growing need for thoughtful reflections and pragmatic illustrations on wisely blending the Internet into the various ways we teach writing across our liberal arts curriculum. But the discussion also convinced me that the final publication would be more successful with a wider selection of contributors who can share their experiences in teaching writing across a range of academic disciplines. I redesigned the site in spring 2013, and with additional CTL funding to attract outstanding essays, publicly announced a “Call for Ideas and Essay Proposals” discussion page on the site (through June 15th). An open peer review of full drafts is scheduled for fall 2013, and the freely accessible final volume will be published digitally under CTL’s own imprint and/or through an open-access scholarly press in 2014.