Bill Grabe outlined twelve ideas for future research in second language/ESL writing during his plenary talk at the Symposium on Second Language Writing today. His list included:

1. The importance of summary writing
2. The importance of exploring lexical, grammatical, and textual features contributing (or not contributing) to writing development
3. The need to move beyond the t-unit as a measure of writing complexity
4. The need to carry out more training studies with larger groups of students—the need to build a repository of controlled results across and within student groups, tasks, and topics
5. The need to build principled and controlled student writing corpora that multiple researchers can access for multiple issues and multiple studies (ICLE is not good enough)
6. The need to carry out (near) replications of highly-cited (and other) studies and have the replications published regularly
7. The need to study in more depth the linkages between vocabulary knowledge (both receptive and productive) and writing abilities
8. The need to study writing variability due to L1 language transfer factors, linguistic or textual
9. The need to expand research on writing assessment practices, particularly in classroom settings, and particularly with respect to “assessment for learning”
10. The need for controlled research on the impact of different media on writing, or using different media as part of writing development
11. The need to expand research on effective ways to carry out teacher training for more effective writing instruction (action research)
12. The need to examine relations between writing abilities (& development) and brain functioning

Admittedly empirically-focused. But thought-provoking. I’m interested, of course, in the implications of #10. What might such research look like? What kinds of questions should we be asking about the impact of different media on writing and writing development? So often administrators still ask whether or not computers are beneficial to students’ language learning and writing development. I’m just not convinced anymore that it’s interesting to ask whether or not the use of computers in the classroom is beneficial to teaching students to write. To me, that’s like asking 50 years ago whether or not it would be beneficial to students’ long-term writing to give them pencils. But what kinds of questions should we ask, especially in relation to L2 writers?

Thanks to Alan Levine, I found this weather forecast website, which really tells me all I need to know. Forget the pop-up ads and multiple clicks on weather.com. All I really want to know is whether it’s going to rain.

I just returned from a great Spring Break trip to Hilton Head, SC with my husband and son. Part of what made it so great was that I was able to stay in touch while I was away–I had unlimited free wireless access where we were staying. Now THAT’S luxury! I was able to finish some work on a textbook project I’m finishing with my co-author (who is in Arizona) and my editor (who is in Delaware), and I could keep up with friends’ blogs, travels, and musings. I even caught up on my email (my inbox is under 20 messages!). I updated my status and profile picture on Facebook.

But I can’t decide how I feel about having such ready technological access while I’m on vacation. Am I ever really “away”? I spent time responding to queries from folks at school. I feel like I’ve completely blurred the boundaries between personal time and work time. But don’t we all blur those boundaries in this profession? Or does anyone have good advice for how to keep them separate?

I observed a class taught by Holly Hayes today, and she introduced me to some freeware tools hosted by NCTE at the ReadWriteThink website. I’m almost embarrassed that I had never seen these tools before, and I’m grateful to Holly for cluing me in! They’re specifically marketed toward K-12 teachers, but several of the tools provide great invention spaces for students in a web-based format that doesn’t require a special account or downloading anything at all. My favorite apps were a couple of mind-mapping applications that could help students generate and/or organize ideas as they write. The tools are fairly simple–they’re not designed for those that want to customize apps for their own use–but they have a wonderful plug-and-play quality that makes them useful for a quick activity in a writing class with virtually no learning curve. Great stuff!

I have to admit, though…I did get distracted playing a word find game based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Here’s what I love the most about teaching in an interdisciplinary program (Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NCSU): I’m continually confronted with my own assumptions about writing, texts, disciplinarity, and language. When we read something for my graduate class, I don’t always ask the same questions that my students ask (most of whom are in Communication). But they’ll raise questions that really get me thinking:

• Why do I question the notion of (sole) authorship?
• Why do I reject the idea of “correctness” in language?
• Why do I define “writing” in the way that I do?
• What is the nature of the relationship(s) between Communication and English, or between Rhetoric and Writing, or between Tech Comm and New Media Studies?
• And why don’t we have interdisciplinary conversations more often?

In my graduate seminar on Technology and Pedagogy last week, we read the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments. Although it was just adopted 3 1/2 years ago (in February 2004), I found myself questioning some of the assumptions and statements in the document. And I also found myself thinking about position statements more generally.

When I taught at Mesa Community College, my colleague Richard Felnagle used to adamantly resist any attempts to write mission or position statements of any kind. I’m sure that on several levels his concerns were justified–in an English department we could go round and round for months about whether to place a comma in the opening clause of the mission statement without ever accomplishing anything. The writing of mission statements can sometimes get in the way of actually doing. But there can be a purpose in clarifying the position of a group, especially when the group is as large and diverse as CCCC.

Another potential frustration of mission statements, though, is that they are often read as acontextual, even though they are, of course, written in a particular context. A statement is representative of the circumstance in which it was written–the time and place of its writing and the people who drafted it–yet position statements can be read as somewhat “timeless” documents. They do, after all, represent the positions of their respective organizations unless they are changed or repealed.

As I read the position statement on digital environments for class last Tuesday, I found myself questioning the need for such a statement. Maybe circumstances have shifted so much in the past 3-4 years that such statements are no longer necessary. Or, maybe more precisely, I’m beginning to think that the positions that we take on teaching in digital environments are also positions that we should take on teaching in general–regardless of the medium of instruction.

The CCCC position statement has some wonderful stuff to say about teaching writing, especially in the section that articulates “Assumptions” about writing digitally:

Assumptions

Courses that engage students in writing digitally may have many features, but all of them should

(a) introduce students to the epistemic (knowledge-constructing) characteristics of information technology, some of which are generic to information technology and some of which are specific to the fields in which the information technology is used;

(b) provide students with opportunities to apply digital technologies to solve substantial problems common to the academic, professional, civic, and/or personal realm of their lives;

(c) include much hands-on use of technologies;

(d) engage students in the critical evaluation of information (see American Library Association, “Information Literacy”); and

(e) prepare students to be reflective practitioners.

As I read these assumptions, though, I realized that I could consistently substitute the word “writing” for “technology/information technology/digital technologies,” and the assumptions would still ring true. The last two assumptions don’t even mention technology at all. Do we still need to separate discussions about teaching writing in general from discussions about teaching writing with technology? Can we begin to assume that writing should be taught in a technology-rich environment because that’s where writing happens? Has our focus shifted too much to the technology itself?

Just before the section on assumptions, the position statement articulates a distinction between “two literacies: a literacy of print and a literacy of the screen.” I’m not sure I agree with this clear-cut distinction. Are these literacies really so easily distinguishable? Don’t they overlap and intersect with each other (or can we even separate these literacies at all)?

Perhaps this distinction is representative of how we thought of and talked about teaching (digital) writing before, but maybe it’s time for CCCC to take another look at this position statement and rethink our stated position and assumptions.

Well, I figured out one way to force myself to blog…I assigned blogged reading/technology responses in my graduate seminar and then told the students that I would blog along with them. So, I have no more excuses.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about forced blogging, or compelled public writing of any kind. NC State has a pretty conservative policy on the issue, and students who blog or write in a wiki in class must sign a FERPA disclaimer before participating. What kind of ethical responsibilities does a teacher have when asking students to write, or communicate in any way, in a public forum? Is that a potential violation of student privacy? Is it an integral part of education? I can think of arguments for both, and for many possibilities in between.

For now, I’m going to just try to get in the habit of blogging myself. I can theorize about privacy issues and writing in the public sphere, but with very little personal experience in this medium, I don’t have much ethos on which to base any argument or theory I might come up with.

So, let the blogging begin!

So…I’ve waited over a month to write another post to my blog. And there’s a reason. I’m frustrated with the technology, and I’m realizing how overwhelming it is to learn something new when you’re behind the curve. There are so many potential things I can do with my blog that my mind is spinning. I start looking at other blogs, widgets, and tools…and then I start thinking about the dozen things I need to do with my blog in order for it to even be functional…and then I give up and do something else.

Perhaps this is a good lesson for me as a teacher. Technology can be exciting and fun, but it can also be overwhelming. I know that in my head, but it’s good for me to be reminded by immersion.

So…if there’s anybody out there who actually read my first blog post (Shelley?), I’ll try to pick up the pace a bit. And I promise to work on cleaning up my sidebar.

I’ve been lurking on the edges of the blogosphere for far too long, and several things have finally converged in my life. It’s time to just jump in and blog.

I’m not sure why I’ve been so resistant to blogging. This blog post alone has taken me nearly 2 weeks to write. I start a draft, delete it, and then rewrite. Blogging has sometimes seemed self-indulgent to me, and perhaps even a bit pointless. I’ve wondered who actually reads blogs when there are so many out there. And there’s something about the confessional nature of the blog that I find unnerving…and I have a natural tendency toward being a slow, skeptical technology adopter.

Obviously, I also have a natural tendency against realizing the powerful potential of new technology, too. I guess imagination was never one of my strengths.

But I’m becoming increasingly aware of how mediated my life is, and as a writing and technology scholar, I want to have a space to reflect on my own use of technology. I’ve found the blogs of others to be helpful, too (cogdog and Shelley Rodrigo, in particular), and cogdog has successfully proselytized the importance of blogging…

So, here I am. I’ll give this a shot.