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CHE: Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers

Frank Baker sent me this one from the Chronicle of Higher Ed....

Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers

As a student at Stanford University, Mark Otuteye wrote in any medium he could find. He wrote blog posts, slam poetry, to-do lists, teaching guides, e-mail and Facebook messages, diary entries, short stories. He wrote a poem in computer code, and he wrote a computer program that helped him catalog all the things he had written.

But Mr. Otuteye hated writing academic papers. Although he had vague dreams of becoming an English professor, he saw academic writing as a "soulless exercise" that felt like "jumping through hoops." When given a writing assignment in class, he says, he would usually adopt a personal tone and more or less ignore the prompt.

"I got away with it," says Mr. Otuteye, who graduated from Stanford in 2006. "Most of the time."

The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.

Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.

A new generation of longitudinal studies, which track large numbers of students over several years, is attempting to settle this argument. The "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students — including Mr. Otuteye — is probably the most extensive to date. (See box at end of article.)

In a shorter project, undergraduates in a first-year writing class at Michigan State University were asked to keep a diary of the writing they did in any environment, whether blogging, text messaging, or gaming. For each act of writing over a two-week period, they recorded the time, genre, audience, location, and purpose of their writing.

Continued http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39writing.htm"TARGET = "_blank"&g....

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Replies to This Discussion

There are huge philosophical implications to consider. Academic writing come from a traditional/modernist notion that any text is inviolate and comes with its own preset meanings. Any writing in this vein that you do about literature or any text for that matter means focusing on this agreed upon (read CliffsNotes) interpretation. Writing on the Net throws this totally out. First the shift in audience has an effect on the quality of the writing (research tells us this) and second, the type of writing on the Net is Transactional meaning that interpretation is made from each individual's background/perspective/understanding/shared understandings. Nothing is agreed upon in advance. Marshall McCluhan would tell us that the medium also enters into this transaction.
The collision occurs when students bring their transactional writing to the Modernist classroom. Academic writing means we don't care what you and your friends think. It's how close you can get to what the experts think and your teacher is one of them.

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