Drifting and Democratizing Textual Objects: Social Composing in a Connected Professional Learning Space

• In Event: 14.042 - Writing and Literacies in New Learning Environments

Abstract

We will report on the social composing practices and processes of educators engaged in an open, networked learning collaboration built on notions of production-centered participatory open networks (Jenkins, 2006; Ito et al., 2013; Thomas & Brown, 2011) and ubiquitous learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2012). The collaboration was designed to engage writers in production, remix, and drift (Steadman, 2012), as opposed to the replication of existing forms. Exploring how educators participated in writing with others across open networks, both on and offline, this paper examines how adult learners composed multimodal and multimediated artifacts, collaborated in liminal and distal configurations, and distributed their writing across differing digital platforms. Our analysis addresses the question: How do socially-shared, iterative artifacts spur writing production in an open, networked professional learning collaboration?

Drawing on the notion of social composing (Stornaiuolo, 2014), we discuss writing produced across open, digital networks with interactive audiences. Framed by a “writing-as-making” approach to social composing, we consider how a “craft paradigm” (Prins, 2012) decenters alphalinguistic notions of writing, refocusing attention on ways makers learn, use, and appropriate multimodal signs, symbols, tools, technologies to compose in/with community. Extending writing-as-design to writing-as-making focuses attention on how textual objects are made, circulate in, and create identities and relations among community participants. Foregrounding the democratic possibilities of production-centered making around shared objects (Latour, 2005), we highlight writing as an emergent, culturally situated social practice that involves multimodal meaning-making.

Data were collected during two intensive month-long summer cycles. To date, 2217 educators opted in as participants, composing and distributing compositions using Twitter (n=18656 tweets), a Google+ Community (n=1658 members), and personal websites (n=133 blogs), resulting in approximately 1600 publicly shared and distributed artifacts about writing-as-making. Using visual rhetoric and circulation methods (Gries, 2013; Farman, 2012), we traced iterations of posted artifacts across the timeframe of the study. We coded artifacts for iterative possibilities (e.g. persons, modes, ideas, tools) explicitly identified by participants in posts, comment threads, and tweets, as well as those interpreted by the team of researchers.

To date, our analysis illuminates three distinct mobilities and relational tendencies among artifacts and makers, each characterized by democratized affordances of ubiquitous learning and collaborative intelligence (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). One such trend we termed as a “burst effect” describes sharp increases in participant production once remix practices take hold in the community. When a participant posted a remix--either of content or form--of another participant’s artifact, bursts of writing-as-making followed. Participants iterated not only on each others’ textual objects, but also on the making processes themselves, indicating that remix literacies extend beyond objects to include socially shared practices and processes.

As studies of social composing are often youth-centered, our research extends these conversations by investigating the practices of adults, specifically educators, as writers and makers, demonstrating how they make meaning intertextually, multimodally, and in newly forming configurations for professional learning.

Authors

• Anna Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Stephanie West-Puckett, East Carolina University

• Christina Cantrill, National Writing Project

• Mia Zamora, Kean University