Week 6: Response to an Extended Analysis

Response to Bailey Cundiff's extended analysis project:

Summary: Bailey's extended analysis argued that Google Docs can be used in the classroom to provide students with real audiences, collaborative writing opportunities, and opportunities to engage in co-constructing knowledge rather than passively receiving predetermined truths.

At first, I was very skeptical about whether Google Docs could provide these benefits to students any better than other technologies or peer critique workshops. However, I was convinced by the power of Google Docs to show students that revision is a process. Bailey's discussion of this is superb, and it is worth quoting at length:

When students have an audience that comments on, edits, and potentially helps compose, their work, they find what Nancy Sommers ([1980] 2011) calls “dissonance”—the “incongruities between intention and execution” that lead to productive revision (52). This process helps students see the composition process as ever changing and never complete. In addition to collaborating with peers, students can synchronously watch teachers grade and comment on their papers (Purcell, Buchanan, and Friedrich 2013, 54). This interaction, though not peer collaboration, can also encourage students to consider what it means to revise their work as they watch their teacher note problematic points in an argument or paper. Whether each student writes his or her own paper or multiple writers collaborate on a single document, the writing process is “transparent…through page history and through explicit discussion of the process” (Lundin 2008, 439). Students become part of a larger whole and learn to articulate their beliefs and understandings while learning those of their peers.

I am especially interested in reading more about the potential benefits and consequences of giving students the ability to watch teachers grade their work. I think the page history is a powerful tool that can be used to show students examples of what kinds of changes a full revision should bring to a document, and it can also provide teachers with a way to show students the differences between a full revision and the "revising" that many beginning writers typically do. Google Docs also allows students to synchronously revise a text and discuss those changes at the same time. Bailey argues that this allows students to engage in a real conversation about the problems and potential revisions for a document, but I'm still skeptical about how often these conversations would happen in reality. 

Bailey also argues that the collaborative writing enabled by Google Docs allows students to actively engage in knowledge creation with their peers. Rather than promoting a banking model of education, this kind of collaborative writing engages students in constantly switching roles between writer, editor, and commentator. Normally, students would fill the role of writer for the majority of an assignment, and they might switch to the role of editor or commentator for one or two class workshops. I think this dynamic role-switching would be invaluable in showing students that writing is an iterative process of communication between author, reader, and text. In print media, this process of communication is extremely passive and, often, disconnect between reader and author. However, using digital writing technologies changes the text to allow for readers and the author to engage in a dynamic conversation with real-time feedback and response. That is a powerful learning tool.

Finally, Bailey discusses the teacher's role in using Google Docs in the classroom. I think she nails it in her description: "Google Docs itself facilitates writing, collaboration, and learning; it does not inspire it." I wholeheartedly agree with her decision to differentiate between the tool and the agent. Google Docs provides a potentially powerful teaching tool, but the teacher must still inspire and guide the learning process. 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Bailey's extended analysis, and I am eager to read more about her topic. My suggestions for Bailey to improve her argument are as follows:

• Compare the difference between digital collaboration and face-to-face collaboration (specifically related to student conversations in peer critiquing workshops).
• Expand on ways that teachers might expose student writing to wider audiences (maybe non-colocated audiences that also respond to student writing? Students would see them as a genuine audience, and it may help students understand that an audience, in general, will consist of real humans that have real responses to the student's document, even if readers aren't physically or immediately present.
• Elaborate on the technical problems that might occur and potential ways that teachers might resolve them (maybe available resources too). For example, discuss the potential problems with students overwriting each others' changes and suggest some potential solutions that teachers might employ.
• The "Knowledge Formation in Collaboration" section knocks the argument out of the park by drawing on the extensive benefits of using Google Docs for collaborative writing. Expand this section! Please?