Community Analysis

I. Community and Learning

Community is a group of people working together toward the same goal In the classroom, a community that consists of instructor, students, and perhaps other faculty, all work together to learn and perhaps create new knowledge. When a community is at its best it can offer encouragement and support and can help students create a sense of personal investment. When students have a personal interest in a subject, they are willing to put more effort into learning.

Fostering community is important for learning, especially in online environments where students must interact with the peers and the instructor through the use of technology. For Garrison and Vaughan, instructors can use blended learning environments to create a community of inquiry in which students can collaborate to reflect and think critically (8).  While an online course may foster of sense of independence that allows students to take advantage of a class’s flexibility, it can also create a sense of being disconnected from the subject and the class. Hewett describes a relative’s negative experience with an online writing course, pointing out that while the student had plenty of self-discipline she did not have enough interaction with the professor (1). Community is especially important in an online writing classroom. A community can provide an audience and a context for writing, therefore in order write well a student should interact with the community. Other students can provide models of good writing, as well as feedback to their peers. Interactivity can enhance, and is perhaps vital to a learning writing in an online classroom.

In an online classroom, different technological tools have different affordances that can foster, or hinder, class interactivity. From discussion boards to chats, they have different expectations for interaction. It is important to be familiar with some of the different technologies available for creating interactivity.

II. Blogs as a tool for online learning

For the class Teaching Online Writing, we used blogs in order to post reviews of academic articles. Students of the class were then encouraged to interact by commenting on article reviews, but it was not required. On its own, the blog created a community that talked about some of the scholarly debates and pedagogical concerns in the field of distance learning. The technology and the way the article review assignment encourage its use created a community with some interactivity.

While blogs can afford students with a lot of interactivity, it is not the most important function of blogs. The most important function of a blog is providing the author a space to write, a space to voice opinions. In Blogger and Wordpress, blog posts usually show up on the main page. Comments are not displayed on the main page and therefore, not as important as the main posts. No matter how much interaction and debate goes on in the comments of a blog post, a viewer can choose to ignore any interaction simply by not clicking on a link. It is also possible to disable comments entirely.

Blogs create an online space where the author can personalize his or her identity. While some students created a blog especially for the class, other students used an academic blog which they had created previously. Thus, they had a scholarly identity online even before the class started. Some students began to create one by posting article reviews for the class assignments. Blogs can also be personalized, but this is also limited. At its core, a blog is a template, after all. Different blogging software can provide different options as far as color scheme and visual design, but the format of a blog remains largely the same. Some students choose to have dark color schemes with a straight forward title, while some have unique and creative titles. I particularly enjoy the name of Kelly Cutchin’s blog, Swansonian Explorations of Rhetoric. Ron Swanson is a character from the show Parks and Recreation who is very blunt and independent. Knowing the pop culture reference could create a sense of community because of shared interests, it could also tell the audience something about the tone of the blog or about the identity of the author.

Comments are the main source for interactions in the blogs. The article reviews are fairly formal, short assignments that require students to summarize an academic article then assess the article’s effectiveness and usefulness for online writing instructors. Different posts have a different number of comments, with the most number of comments on one post being seven or eight. The comments, for the most part, reflect the language of the posts. They are mostly a paragraph or more in length and use an academic tone in order to speak about the posts. Students comment on what part of the review most interests them, sometimes asking for clarification. For the majority of comments, the authors of the blog posts do not respond. That is perhaps what limits interaction the most- the lack of a back and forth between students on the blogs. A lot of the comments have questions and leave room for debate as well, with students using phrases such as “I think” and “In my experience,” and leaving questions for further discussion.  As mentioned before, while interactivity is definitely an affordance of blogs, it is not the main emphasis.

Using blogs for online classrooms could definitely be helpful for fostering interactivity. Blogs could give students a sense of audience, especially with the feedback they could get from their peers. It also provides an archive for classwork and could help them practice creating an identity online.

In order to foster more interactivity on a blog and help create community, it may be worthwhile to have students post their responses to an on going debate in the field. In class, we did many freewrites in response to certain prompts and questions. Perhaps posting those online could give students room to interact more with each other. While encouraging students to put lower stakes pieces of writing on the blog could promote more discussion, it may also come at the cost of identity. Many of the students in this class use their blogs as a space for their academic works and could be hesitant to post something like a ten-minute free write online for others to see. Teaching students to use RSS feeds for blogs could also encourage them to interact with the blogs more, as they would see when new posts go up.

III. Community in other aspects of the course

At the beginning of the course, students created a Facebook group in which they could interact with one another. While the blogs created a sense of a scholarly community, there was much more interaction on the Facebook group. Students posted concerns about assignments that they would not post anywhere else. Articles mentioned in class or found online outside of class hours also ended up on the page. The Facebook group was much more informal and had lower stakes. It is also a space that the instructor does not see, which can provide certain advantages for students who may be shy around instructors. In my experience, many of my professors have encouraged a Facebook group so that we can interact in our own time. Whether a class has a Facebook group or not usually depends on whether or not a student will use some free time to create one and has access to other classmates’ full names to find them. Facebook groups are fairly easy to create.

IV. Conclusion

Community is important to online learning environments, especially in teaching writing online. Blogs are a useful tool in that they provide students a space to write for a concrete audience, and they can get feedback from their peers. The amount of feedback may be limited by the technology that does not forefront interactivity, and by the fact that commenting on the blogs may be higher stakes than commenting in other media.

Sources

Hewett, Beth and Kevin Depew. Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction. N.d. TS. Old Dominion University, Virginia.

Vaughan, Normal D. "Introduction." From Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines. By D. Randy Garrison. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. 1-12. Print.

Yang, Yu-Fen. "A Reciprocal Peer Review System to Support College Students' Writing." British Journal of Educational Technology 42.4 (2011): 687-700. Web. 6 June 2014.

The purpose of this study was to create an online environment in which students could use a reciprocal peer review system in order to improve the texts of fellow students. The researcher created a process of peer review based on the theory of cognitive apprenticeship in which knowledge transfer works through several processes: modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, and exploration. These processes could be used to encourage peer review.  In the modeling phase, students could look at the work of other students and model their own text based on their peers’ writing. In the process of coaching, students could make grammar revisions, as these local errors may not be noticed by the original writer. In the scaffolding phase, students make suggestions about how to improve the paper globally, either by suggesting content changes or organizational changes. Articulation involves providing reasoning behind any suggestions a student may make. In reflection, students can compare their own writing process with that of their peers. Exploration involves choosing which suggestions to incorporate into their own paper.

A total of 95 students participated in the study. These students were from three English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classes and were in their third year at a university of science and technology in Taiwan. The artifacts collected for the study were first drafts, final drafts, and reflective journals. Most students in the class found that the process of peer review was helpful and appreciated the interaction.

Overall, this article would be helpful for an online writing instructor. While many articles have worked on the implicit notion that peer review, like any other type of writing, is a process, having the article explicitly name it as a process is definitely a helpful way of approaching peer review. Unfortunately, one of the clear drawbacks from this article is that the software used in the study is not explicitly named, nor is it thoroughly detailed. Many of the functions students use are named and explained, but it is not clear what programs they are using. By calling the peer review process a an online system, the article gives an impression that there was software developed specifically for students to use in this study, but that may not be the case. Several word processing programs could be involved, or it could be one piece of software. It still provides some ways to use certain tools in software for peer review, for example, allowing other students to look at the difference between drafts in the work of their peers. The idea that students should give reasons for making suggestions and write reflective journals about their process is not a new one, but definitely one to consider in applying a process of peer review in an online writing classroom.

Knight, Linda V., and Theresa A. Steinbach. "Adapting Peer Review to an Online Course: An Exploratory Case Study." Journal of Information Technology Education 10 (2011): 81-100. Education Research Complete. Web. 5 June 2014.

This is an exploratory case study done by researchers in Information Technology (IT). In order to study the operational aspects of implementing peer review in an online classroom versus a traditional classroom, they studied the process in two sections of the same course,one section online and one section in a traditional face to face classroom. The class was an introductory level IT course that taught students the basics of creating multimedia websites. Students had to create websites and use peer feedback in order to improve their design and accessibility. The course instructor even implemented peer review as part of the overall grade. Peer review done in the classroom was blind, and the students reviewed websites that were in different sections.

The researchers concluded that overall, the implementation of peer review online was more challenging and time consuming than in a traditional classroom. In the face to face classroom, students were assigned different websites and used pen and paper to complete peer review rubrics. Students could hand in the rubrics that could then be distributed to the reviewees. Students in the online sections used kwiksurvey.com, then the professor had to erase all identifying information from the survey data and distribute, through email, to the students. The researchers suggested that software development could make several steps in the peer review process online much less complicated.

This article could be useful for online instructors because this article focuses on the steps in took to implement an online review process, and what struggles they faced. It also provides some pragmatic suggestions in creating an online peer review process: planning ahead, knowing the kind of peer review process you want to implement, and other tips. it also provides the rubric used in the course.  The way in which these researchers implement peer review in the classroom and online seems very complicated and time-consuming, however.For the researchers, a blind peer review as important because they felt it provided more honest reviews. One can see the importance of having a peer that can honestly evaluate the design and usability of a website. The insistence on reviewer anonymity and the use of surveys made the process more complicated, so other software currently available may be much more useful in providing peer reviews. Making peer reviews blind is another aspect that can slow down the process because author data is embedded in different software.

Lam, Ricky. "A Peer Review Training Workshop: Coaching Students to Give and Evaluate Peer Feedback." TESL Canada Journal 27.2 (2010): 114-27.ERIC. Web. 31 May 2014.

Using procedures found in other empirical studies, an instructor at Hong Kong University createdpeer review workshop for 30 freshman ESL students. The workshop, consisted of three one-hour class periods over the course of three weeks, taught students how to give and receive constructive peer feedback. The instructor taught students a four-step procedure for giving peer feedback found in another study: clarifying, explaining, and giving suggestions.  This method of learning instruction also required students to break down suggestions and errors into globalized versus localized writing issues, and treatable versus untreatable writing errors. Each week was also a different step in teaching students peer review. In the first week, successful peer review was modeled for the students. In the second week, students explored how to do peer reviews and practiced it on fellow students’ papers. In the third week, students learned how to evaluate peer feedback and how to best implement it. While the students found that keeping logs of peer review and how they implemented into their own work almost doubled their workload, they found the workshop useful overall. Lam also provides some useful suggestions for other instructors who wish to create a peer review process in their classrooms. The use of scoring guides is one suggestion.  Additionally, Lam suggests that using technology like Wikipedias or class blogs could help facilitate peer review and cause students to consider peer review more carefully. These technologies allow a wider audience to see comments made, so students may put more effort into them.

While the participants in this study were ESL students, the author also notes that creating a workshop for peer review would be useful for native English speakers. In an online writing environment, it might be hard to dedicate three weeks of class time to peer review due to the fact that some online courses are more abbreviated, and others are asynchronous and may not allow for as much teacher intervention. The procedure the instructor taught the students and the idea of keeping a peer review log are very useful and could be migrated into an online course. Overall, this article was informative and could be useful for teachers who wish to find a way to teach peer review online.