The Electronic Writing Workshop and the e-Rhetorical Forum

I talked previously about the importance of choice for student writing in our classrooms. I want to discuss now the difference that using technology can make for conducting our "writing workshop" where students write on topics of their choice. I have taught in a teaching context where students shared and responded to each other over electronic networks for over fifteen years, and in that time I've noticed some important differences from what we might call a "traditional" classroom learning environment (i.e. non-mediated).

The first set of differences is merely a matter of mechanics. An electronic network makes a writing workshop work so much better. Student writing posted to an online setting is instantly available to everyone in the class. When doing peer response, there is no need to make multiple copies for the whole group to read, nor is there the need for turn-taking in the act of peer response. Multiple readers can be responding to the same text concurrently. Lastly, the electronic writing workshop explodes the walls of the classroom so that students can access and respond to this writing outside of class.

The next difference in the Electronic writing workshop is really in degree not kind. One of the strengths we know of writing workshop is the peer and collaborative nature of the classroom ecology. Students don't just feed all their writing to the teacher but share their writing with their peer or response group. This peer influence is crucial to the difference writing workshop makes for student writers. The electronic writing workshop heightens this peer and collaborative influence significantly. I believe sharing and responding to writing within an e-Rhetorical forum--a recurring place for posting and sharing writing--positions student into a unique dual role I call the "role of the spectator-participant." My meaning, however, does not imply the objective distance that term implies from ethnographic methodology. Within a learning context where students are posting and responding to each others writing over an online network, the students posting writing are all participants; however, at the same time they are spectators because they are reading and watching the posts of their peers. Each role has what we might consider a symbiotic relationship to the other role. The knowledge that one's writing will be going in front of the entire class influence our participation; likewise, since we are observing the performance of others we see things that influence what we decide to do when it is our turn to perform and put our writing in front of the group.

I have defined six key influences that this role of the spectator-participant has on student writings within an electronic writing workshop:

Peer Influence/Membership: Students experience a sense of common identity and common activity. Within this group they look to each other for support, ideas, and examples. The sense of membership fosters an interest for the spectator in the activities of the other members and stimulates the participant into more engaged participation in the group.

Audience: Because students know that their writing sent to the group in the network will be read by the others in the group and that their writing will be compared to the writing of their peers, students experience a greater sense of audience. Although participants don’t have a uniform reaction to this awareness of audience, many student/participants experience a feeling of engagement, an openness and comfort to try more things with their writing, and a pressure to make their writing better and fit more into the “normal discourse” of the group.

Multiplicity: One of the chief experiences for the spectator is a sense of multiplicity. They are exposed through the network to many viewpoints and ideas. Through the exposure to different ideas and perspectives (the “other”), students are given an expanded base of information and they experience a sense of displacement from their original viewpoint.

Comparability: Multiplicity stimulates an experience of comparability for the spectator. The students compare their writing to the writing of their peers and they compare the writing of their peers to each other.

Orientation/Perspective/Normalizing: What the spectator experiences and then the participant attempts to incorporate into their participation is a sense of orientation or perspective. If multiplicity exposes the spectator to new ideas, comparability and evaluation of that multiplicity help to form a new sense of where they fit in to the larger discourse of the group.

Disembodiment/Virtual Time/Objectivity: The computer interface makes the sharing and responding to texts different. Because the spectator-participant reads and shares writing through the computer (disembodied and in virtual time), participants experience distance from the person they are responding to, free from the social dynamics of face-to-face communication. For spectators and participants, the computer interface also can lead to more deliberative communication.

Students placed into the learning context of the electronic writing workshop are placed into a different position, a different dynamic than the traditional classroom writing workshop that influences their learning and engagement in the writing classroom. I'd like to say this context is qualitatively better, but I can't. I energy of a face-to-face writing group is very powerful, so I think we need to take a critical look at the electronic writing workshop to see the gains and losses. My belief is that the electronic writing workshop is broader and potentially deeper, but not necessarily so (just as the traditional writing workshop is no guarantee). The greatest loss is the body--the voice and flesh of face-to-face interaction. The impact of this loss should not be slighted; however, there are gains in the online setting, especially regarding multiplicity and comparability.

"as participants we APPLY our value systems, but as spectators we GENERATE and REFINE the system itself." --James Britton, "Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writing"