Doing the Deed |
vol. 6 Iss. 2 Fall 2001
introduction | background | terms | webbing | samples | possibilities | acknowledgements Doing the DeedUsing a Web portfolio to its potential involves at minimum a semester-long commitment to the project, and the portfolio itself needs to be more than a reproduction of print. At its best, it can offer students all of the tools of multimedia to achieve their personal and academic writing aims. At worst, it can become a distraction, causing students to spend more time worrying about the "flash" instead of improving their textual communication skills, and thus creating the "trash." Garbage in/garbage out, as the saying goes. As with any other technology, it needs to be tempered by the instructor with clear assignments, aims, and goals for the semester. By its nature, a writer's Web is particularly responsive to changes in the technological process and the production of text. It can take situational variables into account, that is, different writing situations can be represented and contextualized. But its most promising attributes are its ability to highlight revision (and the reasons for it), and its ability to provide a place within itself for writer self-assessment. Students can explain in their own words how they envision the task or assignment, how and why they developed particular writing strategies, and how they assess their own progress. It can also allow for more interactive peer responding and prompt better responses from peer and instructor evaluators. By linking later responses to the assignment to previous ones, students can see first hand whether or not their revision strategies were successful, or if the changes in one place prompt other changes or cloud the topic's issues further. Instructors or peers can demonstrate why some suggestions should be ignored and others taken. With the writer's original intentions available to them via the Webpage, peer responders and instructors can give better feedback for revisions on both first and second drafts.
In short, it teaches students how to read and assess their own writing as well as giving their instructors/peers insight into their strategies. It shifts the burden of responsibility for steady improvement over time to the student herself – and hopefully gives her the tools to continue to value writing as a creative thinking process beyond the first year writing experience.
Constructing the Web sequentially around a theme or symbol can allow for series' of writings that gradually increase in complexity across assignments. A central theme will give students the opportunity to search for or create multimedia applications that cross assignment boundaries and contextualize their web more figuratively, and non-text elements can be more than mere illustrations. They can choose a symbol that represents their thinking on a topic and use it as an extended metaphor throughout the Web. At the completion of each drafting assignment, the student can incorporate a page (as links or as pop-up boxes) explaining their writing process, the problems they encountered, and questions for responders as to how they might best overcome these problems during revision. In tandem with good peer review guidelines, each student's own questions and justifications can achieve more cogent responses to each successive draft. The fact that these "thinking pages" remain available makes possible more recursive revisions, even in cases where the second-draft revision is less acceptable than the first. Readers can point out more clearly where the second draft went awry and which places in the first one were better.
The final assignment in original web creation should then become each student's self-assessment of the semester's writing work. Minimally, it would involve a critique of each assignment, including the drafting process and the revisions; a discussion of recurring problems in their writing; progress they believe they have made; and what they believe still needs improvement. With this final assignment in hand, the writing instructor has a detailed, firsthand account of each of her student's writing processes across the semester: a self-metaphorization designed by the student, complete with the student's validation of it; a record of peer responses (alternate readings) and how they were used to revise text; and a summary of what the student has learned about audience, revision, and writing as a process. This assignment also remains open to peer responding. Other readers may see significant issues that the original writer has overlooked, and in some cases may respond that what the writer considers problematic is actually not so. To these comments, the instructor adds her own. The final result is a collection of alternative readings of their web from multiple readers. Detailed information from each student's writing web can supply the reliability and validity necessary for an accurate assessment of the student's writing at the course/classroom level, measuring the kinds of learning that most instructors consider vital to writing instruction – higher level problem solving and critical thinking.
vol. 6 Iss. 2 Fall 2001