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Mission Statement
Statement of Need
Southern California has the advantage of a concentration of institutions of higher learning, with a growing array of innovative uses of technology in the writing classroom that are being tested in the context of vibrant multicultural communities. Until now, however, instructors and researchers working with curricula centered on social media and digital texts have operated mostly on their own or only tangentially connected through national or international mailing lists and collaborative websites. Moreover, access to resources has not been equitably distributed across institutions, leaving some in community colleges and inner-city high schools at a loss. To take advantage of the critical density of campuses and to collaborate on the effective uses of new writing technologies in increasingly diverse classrooms, educators need a context for gathering and sharing innovations.
Andrea Lunsford and other researchers have shown that it is the writing done outside course curricula, aimed at public audiences, that is often most valued by students long-term. Yet the writing that students do in social media venues is commonly discounted as irrelevant to their academic literacy and frequently marginalized as a distraction. Nonetheless, since writing is now widely accepted as a “mode of learning” (Emig 1977) in writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives, these so-called “informal” writing situations can also offer ways to show students how they already may engage in transferable practices of rhetorical analysis, interpretation of documents and images, evaluation of bias, reasoning about causality, and many other types of intellectual inquiry.
The Southern California Institute for Writing Technology Education (SCIWRITER) will provide workshops, symposia, conferences, online courses, and other resources for modeling and mentoring new pedagogical techniques for learning with social media. It is designed to support instructor-researchers in
A synergy between technology and composition is particularly useful because online discourse capitalizes on many aspects of good writing pedagogy by seeing writing as a public act, fostering reciprocity with audiences, participating actively in knowledge networks, and thinking critically about writing as process and product. This year thousands of students in SCIWRITER-affiliated college composition courses in Southern California will be using blogs, wikis, file-sharing programs, online feeds, social networking sites, social bookmarking, metadata tagging, multiplayer games, multi-user virtual worlds, and other techniques to foster collaboration and communication. The largest courses will be UC Irvine’s Humanities Core Course (with 1,200 students) and Argument and Research (with almost 6,000 students), but SCIWRITER also includes pilot courses and writing seminars. Librarians will be active partners as they encourage twenty-first century research within a growing electronic archive in which user-generated content will soon be shaping the corpus of knowledge. For multi-lingual students, this project recognizes the importance of the electronic literacy practices of those who are working in languages other than English and develop strategies for their inclusion and development as writers.
Goals and Objectives
SCIWRITER will facilitate networks and aggregate resources for teaching and research, so as to connect the social media practices of incoming and undergraduate students with the academic literacy conventions that shape expectations in colleges and universities. In pursuit of this objective, SCIWRITER is animated by a recognition that the networks and resources should be informed by some notion of “best practices,” which as defined by the Sloan Consortium include innovation, replicability, potential impact, and scope. To arrive at and disseminate these “best practices,” SCIWRITER will reach out to student, faculty, and administrator stakeholders. This cohort of players is especially relevant in light of the recent ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, which closed with the assertion that among the “institutional strategies for optimizing technology effectiveness for learning” are “developing instructors’ technology skill sets; training instructors on how and when to effectively integrate technology and pedagogy; [and] increasing instructor and administrator awareness about how their students differ in technology savvy and access to technology resources, and how to factor that into instruction.”
To include critical voices, this project would sponsor events that acknowledge anxieties when authorship is increasingly defined by the use of the World Wide Web: concerns about access to technology, the possibility of plagiarism, and threats to privacy would be discussed at SCIWRITER events within the framework of creating workable pedagogical strategies. At a time when mass media emphasize predator panic or the supposed lack of engagement or affect among multitasking teens, it is also critical to educate parents constructively about new literacy practices.
Outreach would take place through several channels. Many team members have already worked on projects that involve close collaboration with faculty from community colleges and high schools. These programs include Humanities Out There, the California Writing project, the AP English testing program, the UC Analytical Writing Placement Examination program, The First Year Institute, California State PTA, the California Summer School for the Arts, public libraries, and more.
Rather than push a software package or style of teaching with technology, SCIWRITER offers flexibility to faculty who may understandably resist tools or techniques that would not be appropriate for their individual pedagogical approaches. Our team of mentors is teaching courses that showcase a range of social media, and we have advisers for each of the following areas: online video, blogs, wikis, MMORPGs, virtual worlds, open source course management software and RSS feeds, and the free online Writing Studio from
The SCIWRITER website at www.sciwriter.org already includes a listing of institutional partnerships, a schedule of public events, reviews of new technologies being used by writing instructors, sample videos, and materials from affiliated course syllabi.
Personnel and Implementation
The core team of Losh, Marino, and Middlebrook will share duties, but each will have a specific area of responsibility. Losh will coordinate public events and workshops. Marino will manage the SCIWRITER website and online courses. Middlebrook will direct SCIWRITER programs for awards, grants, and mentoring.