Jack Dougherty - Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning

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Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell, editors

University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor

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2015 by Jack Dougherty, Tennyson ODonnell, and chapter contributors

Some rights reserved

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Published in the United States of America by
University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

2018 2017 2016 2015 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/dh.13396229.0001.001

ISBN 978-0-472-07282-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-472-05282-0 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-472-12135-9 (e-book)

This book was produced using PressBooks.com, and PDF rendering was done by PrinceXML.

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To all teachers who have patiently read, listened, commented on, and encouraged students in the writing process.

J.D. and T.O.

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DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press, is dedicated to publishing work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities.

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1. Introduction
   Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell
2. Sister Classrooms
   Blogging Across Disciplines and Campuses
   Amanda Hagood and Carmel Price
3. Indigenizing Wikipedia
   Student Accountability to Native American Authors on the Worlds Largest Encyclopedia
   Siobhan Senier
4. Science Writing, Wikis, and Collaborative Learning
   Michael O'Donnell
5. Cooperative In-Class Writing with Google Docs
   Jim Trostle
6. Co-Writing, Peer Editing, and Publishing in the Cloud
   Jack Dougherty
7. How We Learned to Drop the Quiz
   Writing in Online Asynchronous Courses
   Celeste Tng Vy Sharpe, Nate Sleeter, and Kelly Schrum Page x
8. Tweet Me A Story
   Leigh Wright
9. Civic Engagement
   Political Web Writing with the Stephen Colbert Super PAC
   Susan Grogan
10. Public Writing and Student Privacy
    Jack Dougherty
11. Consider the Audience
    Jen Rajchel
12. Creating the Reader-Viewer
    Engaging Students with Scholarly Web Texts
    Anita M. DeRouen
13. Pulling Back the Curtain
    Writing History Through Video Games
    Shawn Graham
14. Getting Uncomfortable
    Identity Exploration in a Multi-Class Blog
    Rochelle Rodrigo and Jennifer Kidd
15. Writing as Curation
    Using a 'Building' and 'Breaking' Pedagogy to Teach Culture in the Digital Age
    Pete Coco and M. Gabriela Torres
16. Student Digital Research and Writing on Slavery
    Alisea Williams McLeod Page xi
17. Web Writing as Intercultural Dialogue
    Holly Oberle
18. The Secondary Source Sitting Next To You
    Christopher Hager
19. Web Writing and Citation
    The Authority of Communities
    Elizabeth Switaj
20. Empowering Education with Social Annotation and Wikis
    Laura Lisabeth
21. There Are No New Directions in Annotations
    Jason B. Jones

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By arrangement with the University of Michigan Press, open-access digital editions of the book are freely available on the Trinity College ePress platform at http://epress.trincoll.edu/webwriting. Readers may view the web edition online, or freely download the PDF, ePUB, and Kindle (Mobi) editions. The Trinity College ePress platform also offers an extra Tutorials section with how-to guides for several digital writing tools mentioned in the text. This platform relies on two open-source WordPress pluginsPressBooks (by Hugh McGuire at Book Oven, Inc.) and PressBooks Textbook (by Brad Payne at BCCampus)on a web server at TrinfoCafe.org (maintained by Carlos Espinosa).

In addition, the 2013 open peer review edition of the book manuscript is freely available from Trinity College at http://webwriting2013.trincoll.edu. This edition includes the open call for essay ideas, preliminary drafts, and over one thousand comments by readers of the manuscript. It relies on another open-source WordPress plugin, CommentPress Core (by Christian Wach at the Institute for the Future of the Book).

All web links to the final edition of this book were functional as of August 2014. Due to the changing nature of the Internet, all external links have been fully cited in the notes to assist readers of the print and digital editions. If a link is no longer active, search the web address using the Way Back Machine provided by the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/.

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Special thanks go to several people who nourished Web Writing in its early stages: The inaugural group of Center for Teaching and Learning Fellows who kindly provided feedback on the first draft (Kath Archer, Brett Barwick, Carol Clark, Luis Figueroa, Irene Papoulis, Joe Palladino), and several colleagues who offered early advice and encouragement, specifically Korey Jackson, Kristen Nawrotzki, colleagues at MediaCommons, and many THATCamp workshop participants. Carlos Espinosa at TrinfoCafe.org capably manages the server that hosts the CommentPress and PressBooks editions of this volume. Christian Wach developed the open-source CommentPress Core plugin (based on a previous version by Eddie Tejeda) and patiently answered several questions about customizing our child theme. Hugh McGuire and colleagues created the open-source PressBooks plugin, and Brad Payne coded the open-source PressBooks Textbook plugin and theme. Our logo was designed by Rita Law, manager of creative services at Trinity College. At Michigan Publishing, we thank editorial director Aaron McCullough and his colleagues Meredith Kahn, Christopher Dreyer, Kevin Hawkins, Jason Colman, Jillian Downey, and Tom Dwyer. We also appreciate the thoughtful commentary of the expert reviewers commissioned by the publisherBarbara Fister, Jason Mittell, Amanda Seligman, and Kate Singeras well as nearly seventy other readers who participated in the open peer review.

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Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell

Web Writing reboots how we think about the Internet in higher education, with special attention paid to liberal arts teaching and learning. Our book carves out pedagogically pragmatic responses to contemporary debates that tend to be dominated by two extreme visions of technology. At one end, skeptics dismiss the web as an unwelcome intrusion into the college classroom, most frequently in the form of gadgets and platforms that distract students from the primary lesson or content. This perspective views Internet technology as a shallow substitute for true learning, yet rarely recognizes its potential to enhance what we value most about a liberal arts education: the intensified learning opportunities presented by writing across the curriculum. At the other extreme, proponents of massive online courses praise the benefits of large-scale video lectures and machine-driven assessments with the promise of opening up the college curriculum to all. Their view embraces the web as a tool to expand student enrollments while reducing instructional labor costs, yet rarely considers its consequences for highly-engaged student learning that we expect in small liberal arts colleges.

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