Web Writing Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell, editors University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor © 2015 by Jack Dougherty, Tennyson O’Donnell, and chapter contributors Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Com- mons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 2018 2017 2016 2015 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/dh.13396229.0001.001 ISBN 978-0-472-07282-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-472-05282-0 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-472-12135-9 (e-book) This book was produced using PressBooks.com, and PDF rendering was done by PrinceXML. Dedication To all teachers who have patiently read, listened, commented on, and encouraged students in the writing process. — J.D. and T.O. DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press, is dedicated to publishing work in new media studies and the emerg- ing field of digital humanities. Contents About this book xiii Acknowledgements xv Introduction 1 Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell Communities Sister Classrooms 17 Blogging Across Disciplines and Campuses Amanda Hagood and Carmel Price Indigenizing Wikipedia 33 Student Accountability to Native American Authors on the World’s Largest Encyclopedia Siobhan Senier Science Writing, Wikis, and Collaborative Learning 47 Michael O'Donnell Cooperative In-Class Writing with Google Docs 55 Jim Trostle Co-Writing, Peer Editing, and Publishing in the 63 Cloud Jack Dougherty Engagement How We Learned to Drop the Quiz 75 Writing in Online Asynchronous Courses Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe, Nate Sleeter, and Kelly Schrum ix Tweet Me A Story 87 Leigh Wright Civic Engagement 101 Political Web Writing with the Stephen Colbert Super PAC Susan Grogan Public Writing and Student Privacy 115 Jack Dougherty Consider the Audience 125 Jen Rajchel Creating the Reader-Viewer 137 Engaging Students with Scholarly Web Texts Anita M. DeRouen Pulling Back the Curtain 149 Writing History Through Video Games Shawn Graham Crossing Boundaries Getting Uncomfortable 161 Identity Exploration in a Multi-Class Blog Rochelle Rodrigo and Jennifer Kidd Writing as Curation 175 Using a 'Building' and 'Breaking' Pedagogy to Teach Culture in the Digital Age Pete Coco and M. Gabriela Torres Student Digital Research and Writing on Slavery 189 Alisea Williams McLeod x Web Writing as Intercultural Dialogue 201 Holly Oberle Citation and Annotation The Secondary Source Sitting Next To You 215 Christopher Hager Web Writing and Citation 223 The Authority of Communities Elizabeth Switaj Empowering Education with Social Annotation and 233 Wikis Laura Lisabeth There Are No New Directions in Annotations 247 Jason B. Jones xi About this book By arrangement with the University of Michigan Press, open-access digital editions of the book are freely available on the Trinity College ePress plat- form at http://epress.trincoll.edu/webwriting. Readers may view the web edition online, or freely download the PDF, ePUB, and Kindle (Mobi) edi- tions. The Trinity College ePress platform also offers an extra Tutorials sec- tion with how-to guides for several digital writing tools mentioned in the text. This platform relies on two open-source WordPress plugins—Press- Books (by Hugh McGuire at Book Oven, Inc.) and PressBooks Textbook (by Brad Payne at BCCampus)—on a web server at TrinfoCafe.org (main- tained by Carlos Espinosa). In addition, the 2013 open peer review edition of the book manuscript is freely available from Trinity College at http://webwriting2013.trincoll.edu. This edition includes the open call for essay ideas, preliminary drafts, and over one thousand comments by readers of the manuscript. It relies on another open-source WordPress plugin, CommentPress Core (by Christian Wach at the Institute for the Future of the Book). All web links to the final edition of this book were functional as of August 2014. Due to the changing nature of the Internet, all external links have been fully cited in the notes to assist readers of the print and digital edi- tions. If a link is no longer active, search the web address using the “Way Back Machine” provided by the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/. xiii Acknowledgements Special thanks go to several people who nourished Web Writing in its early stages: The inaugural group of Center for Teaching and Learning Fel- lows who kindly provided feedback on the first draft (Kath Archer, Brett Barwick, Carol Clark, Luis Figueroa, Irene Papoulis, Joe Palladino), and several colleagues who offered early advice and encouragement, specif- ically Korey Jackson, Kristen Nawrotzki, colleagues at MediaCommons, and many THATCamp workshop participants. Carlos Espinosa at Trin- foCafe.org capably manages the server that hosts the CommentPress and PressBooks editions of this volume. Christian Wach developed the open- source CommentPress Core plugin (based on a previous version by Eddie Tejeda) and patiently answered several questions about customizing our child theme. Hugh McGuire and colleagues created the open-source Press- Books plugin, and Brad Payne coded the open-source PressBooks Textbook plugin and theme. Our logo was designed by Rita Law, manager of creative services at Trinity College. At Michigan Publishing, we thank editorial director Aaron McCullough and his colleagues Meredith Kahn, Christo- pher Dreyer, Kevin Hawkins, Jason Colman, Jillian Downey, and Tom Dwyer. We also appreciate the thoughtful commentary of the expert reviewers commissioned by the publisher—Barbara Fister, Jason Mittell, Amanda Seligman, and Kate Singer—as well as nearly seventy other readers who participated in the open peer review. xv Introduction Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell Why this book? Web Writing reboots how we think about the Internet in higher education, with special attention paid to liberal arts teaching and learning. Our book carves out pedagogically pragmatic responses to contemporary debates that tend to be dominated by two extreme visions of technology. At one end, skeptics dismiss the web as an unwelcome intrusion into the college class- room, most frequently in the form of gadgets and platforms that distract students from the primary lesson or content. This perspective views Inter- net technology as a shallow substitute for true learning, yet rarely recog- nizes its potential to enhance what we value most about a liberal arts edu- cation: the intensified learning opportunities presented by writing across the curriculum. At the other extreme, proponents of massive online courses praise the benefits of large-scale video lectures and machine-driven assess- ments with the promise of opening up the college curriculum to all. Their view embraces the web as a tool to expand student enrollments while reducing instructional labor costs, yet rarely considers its consequences for highly-engaged student learning that we expect in small liberal arts colleg- es. Prior to writing this book, much of our thinking was dominated by these two extreme positions. On one side, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Minds, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, was selected by our liberal arts campus, Trinity College, as the required book for all first-year students in fall 2012.1 A few months later on the other side, The New York Times declared 2012 to be “The Year of the MOOC,” and its prominent opinion essayist Thomas Friedman announced that “nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive online course.”2 But neither of these extremes fit with our experi- ences as liberal arts educators who were experimenting with digital tech- 1 2 • WEB WRITING nologies to improve our students’ writing. As a result, we decided to author our own book and invited others to join us in drafting chapters and openly peer reviewing the manuscript on the public web. Web Writing seeks to bridge philosophical and practical questions that arise from the experiences of liberal arts educators who have stepped into the digital realm. What are the most—and least—compelling reasons for why we should integrate web writing into our curriculum? Which tools and teaching methods deepen—rather than distract from—thoughtful learning? How does student engagement and sense of community evolve when we share our drafts and commentary on the public web? To what extent does writing on the web enable our students to cross over divisive boundaries, and what new challenges does it create? The book’s subtitle signals our desire to blend “why” questions with examples of “how” it can be done, pre- sented in both print and digital formats. As co-editors of this volume, we steer a middle course that argues for thoughtfully integrating web tools into a liberal arts education. Whether in persuasive essays, scientific reports, or creative expression, all academic disciplines value clear and compelling prose. The act of writing visually demonstrates our thought processes: how we respond to ideas that chal- lenge our own thinking, consider alternative perspectives or counter-evi- dence, and create entirely new points of view. As college educators, we recognize that our students become more engaged in the writing process when they draft, share, and respond to writing with a community of peer readers who encourage and challenge them to revise muddled first drafts into more polished, thoughtful essays. Moreover, we now realize how a new generation of web-based writing tools—including wikis, Google Doc- uments, WordPress, and others—can transform how our students author, edit, publish, and comment on texts in ways that advance, rather than dis- tract from, our liberal arts mission.