The Pros and Cons of Public Writing Online
The integration of old and new methods of writing is a complex issue that must be addressed with students. Students use a lot of technology, yet on the whole they have written their academic papers in traditional paper formats. Given this dichotomy, they may not understand instructions for creating academic writing in online environments. Academic writing includes such criteria as writing complex sentences to express complex thoughts. The written text may either be all on one page, unlike most web sites they are familiar with (perhaps in a file format rather than a web page) or the text may be written in a series of well-connected web pages.

Students will want to use existing habits learned in MySpace and other arenas, or they will resist writing in the new format altogether. K-12 online writing has mostly emphasized personal writing, collaborative / exploratory writing (blogging and wikis), and website projects where the writing is secondary to the content (as in a "web quest"). This kind of web writing emphasizes information, short passages, and only brief analysis. The purpose is to convey information (either about your personal life or about your topic).

Students entering the college classroom transfer these habits from their personal life and K-12 education. Consider the sites listed on Wetpaint's Higher Education wiki. Problems include casual language, lack of clear source citation, and lack of depth. Enthusiasm, however, is clearly evident and ideas are creative.

Other typical approaches for writing assignments include using online environments to do pre-writing. As one educator remarks in her blog Classroom 2.0: "online discussions might serve as a sort of pre-writing activity for essays, stories, or other written compositions to help students develop and articulate their ideas....students might use discussion forums to discuss debatable issues in preparation for persuasive essays on the same topics (which could potentially be published on blogs or wikis). Or they might use a blog post as a seed for an essay, inviting comments from other students to help them develop their ideas." Using Web 2.0 applications in this way can help students generate ideas, but what directions do they need in order to conduct the writing process in the web environment? When students complete their papers off line, and then transfer the finished product to an online environment, problems occur. Students may not consider their audience fully or meet their online audience's needs for presentation of content.

Writing, particularly in later stages,should be constructed in the application that will be used online rather than transfered, so that students conceptualize their paper in the designated application.

"It's my hypothesis that because interactive online writing shares some affordances with oral communication (e.g., audience presence and reciprocity), and other affordances with traditional written communication (e.g., a material graphic record), it can, in the context of effective instruction, potentially support “writing as inquiry” (Hillocks, 1984; 1986; 1995), providing a bridge between speaking and writing that promotes audience awareness and facilitates substantive, interactive idea development" (Classroom 2.0).

While many educators and researchers extol the virtues of using such digital communication media to support student writing, few have systematically demonstrated their impact on students' written products. There is clear evidence that such activities can engage students in writing in exciting and important ways, but not as much documented evidence about how specifically they improve student writing.


We continue this topic on the page Teaching and Assessment with Public Writing