Aided, Inspired, Multiplied: Web 2.0, Collaborative Writing, and Social Reading (Online Session)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: On Line Format

Abstract

Our received habits and traditions of reading are changing rapidly in the era of Web 2.0, such that “literary” texts are produced, disseminated, consumed, and interpreted increasingly in digital/networked spaces. More than 40 years after Barthes’ delirious exhortations to “writerly” reading, emergent modes of digital pedagogy invite students to inscribe texts in ways that exceed dominant practices of “close reading,” especially by activating cultural contexts for reading, writing, and interpretation. This panel will explore several strategies of dissent from foundational features of literary culture and literary pedagogy: the assumption that both reading and writing unfold in a silent, solitary space; the privileging of the private subject as both source and and aim of literary “meaning”; and the private circuit that conveys students’ critical writing between themselves and their instructors.

Our panelists use digital writing spaces (in very different ways) to open up literary pedagogy to question the authority of the instructor and the canonized “primary text” and to distribute critical agency throughout the “student body,” reimagined as an assemblage that works collaboratively to produce texts that are collectively authored and visible to broader publics. All three approaches share a commitment to fostering more democratic, reciprocal relations between students, authors, and teachers. Allred’s work uses the “Ivanhoe” plugin for WordPress to transform Melville’s Billy Budd into an RPG, in which students, librarians, and instructor explore the inner workings and outer cultural contexts for the novella. Using the Scalar platform, Hanley’s project engages students in networking texts and contexts to explore the relation between Hari Kunzru’s novel, Transmission (2005), and the darling of Silicon Valley capital, Uber. Glass’s talk introduces Social Paper, a collaborative writing platform she co-created, as a free/open alternative to proprietary LMSs, one that encourages the kind of democratic dialogue championed by Paulo Freire.

The benefits of this approach are many and varied. Students are more engaged when writing for audiences other than the instructor, especially when the projects are open to public view and/or comment. Students also read each other’s work more consistently and zealously when using these interfaces/assignments, integrating “peer review” more deeply into their writing habits than in traditional pedagogy. In these online writing and learning spaces, students can become more self-conscious and critical of the affordances and limits of different media, especially the boundaries imposed by traditional genres of student writing. Students can also begin to understand and practice knowledge-making as purposeful, collaborative process. Finally, when students occupy digital writing spaces together, they learn more about each other’s writing and research processes in ways that often diminish anxiety as they see one another struggle through difficult concepts or rhetorical challenges. One last note: in the spirit of our panelists’ concerns and the conference’s broader theme, we will pre-circulate the papers and encourage audience members to comment using hypothes.is, a free/open web annotation platform that itself embodies the ethos of collaborative and democratic modes of critique that the papers promote.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Jeremy Dean, hypothes.is

Individual Presentations

• Research, Interpretation, Play: Billy Budd as Role-Playing Game via Ivanhoe for Wordpress - Jeff Allred, Hunter College (CUNY)

• Exploiting the Network: Student Learning on Collaborative Platforms - Lawrence Hanley, San Francisco State University

• Towards Dialogical Student Publics: An Emancipatory Approach to Networked Writing Tools in the Classroom - Erin Glass, University of California, San Diego

Comment

• Jeremy Dean, hypothes.is