Building Community in the Online Classroom: Social Architecture and Electronic Writing

Introduction


This annotated bibliography blog is a discussion of some of the sources I will be using for my final project in ENGL 8121, a hypertextual scholarly article. While only a partial list, I feel that this list is diverse, interdisciplinary, and representative of a variety of perspectives on the subject of constructing online learning communities using a variety of tools, including electronic writing. For the purposes of my project, I am interested in further examining online community building in general, online learning communities, how electronic writing shapes online learning communities, and the problems and issues at the center of online learning communities, specifically in terms of gender, race, multiculturalism, and the authority of the instructor. I plan to take a postmodern and feminist pedagogical approach to this project, and I feel that this is evidenced through my annotated bibliography.

The experience of composing an annotated bibliography was not new to me: it is something I have done in the past and something I have taught my students. The experience of blogging my annotated bibliography was completely new, however. I have started a blog in the past, posted once, and never spent much time learning to use all of the tools and techniques available to make my blog more effective. This time, however, I learned how to tag, organize, and design my posts in a way that would be effective and meaningful to my reader. While I still have some learning to do, I am basically a first time blogger, and I am mostly happy with what I have created. I look forward to incorporating this new media in other ways, especially in the classroom, and I have really enjoyed this experience. If I had not been instructed to design and compose an annotated bibliography blog for this project, I would probably not have chosen to sit down, complete the tutorials, and increase my knowledge of blogging on my own. This experience has opened my mind further to possibilities for the use of new media in the classroom (online and traditional).



Conclusion

In terms of the actual content of my annotated bibliography blog, I am pleased with the range and scope of sources I have discussed. I am in the process of continuing my research, accessing even more seminal texts, and narrowing the scope of my project a bit. I found when putting this annotated bibliography blog together that I am most interested in online learning communities, gender and race, feminist pedagogy, and postmodern pedagogy. I would like to take my project more in that direction. I feel that through my reading I have gained an excellent understanding of what it takes to build an online community in general. I would like to focus more on how this operates in the online classroom through lenses of gender, race, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Working on this annotated bibliography blog allowed me to see the connections between the sources I have consulted and actually link them together under common labels or tags. Additionally, seeing (as a list of labels) the subjects I highlighted from the readings helped me focus the scope of my project a bit more. My final project for ENGL 8121 is obviously a work in progress, and the blog is representative of how we continue to draft, revise, add, edit, and tweak our writing process.

One of the most important points I took away from this blogging experience is that the blog itself and the ease with which I can update and edit it is a visual representation of the progress I am making on my project: I may add or potentially delete some sources from the bibliography of my actual scholarly article, but all have been useful in helping me continue to hone my interest in this general topic. The fluidity of blogging is very close to how I envision the writing process, and, honestly, this media was more useful to me in developing my ideas that conventional writing. I am continuously surprised at how I have transitioned from the type of student how painstaking wrote out every word on a yellow legal pad before carefully entering an essay into word processing software, only to go through multiple revisions once this was completed. Now, I draft and revise simultaneously in Word, and I am starting to see very clearly the opportunities for an even more fluid process available through blogging. I did type my posts first in Word and copy and paste them into my blog, so there are some formatting kinks I need to work on. I believe, however, that blogging for a traditional writing assignment opens up new possibilities for composition and community.

The Use of Asynchronus Discussion: Creating a Text of Talk

Black, Allison. “The Use of Asynchronous Discussion: Creating a Text of Talk.” Contemporary     Issues in Technology and English Language Arts Teacher Education. 2005. http://www.citejournal.org/vol5/iss1/languagearts/article1.cfm (23 September 2009)

This article is a pragmatic look at asynchronous chat and its position in the online classroom. Black shares her own experiences teaching in the online classroom and advocates that “a text of talk” is created through asynchronous chats. She argues that this text of talk is or should be the location for critical thinking and understanding in the online classroom and that the instructor should structure it in terms of guidelines and assessment as the important component of online learning it is. She discusses her own guidelines for student participation in asynchronous forums. Black believes that discussions of asynchronous chat in the online classroom are few and far between.

In this article, Black is most concerned with the quality of responses in asynchronous discussion forums. What I find most interesting about this article is that it attempts to comment (directly and indirectly) on student motivation in the online classroom. There does not seem to be a great deal of research on this topic and not many people are writing on it. This topic represents an opportunity to contribute to a discussion related to problems and issues in the online classroom and will hopefully provide fodder for future research projects. I think Black makes a good point that teachers need to be thinking about what their requiring of their students in asynchronous chats, a major component of online learning, and how we can maximize the use of critical thinking skills in such a forum as we strive to do in the on-ground classroom. It would seem that Black believes that the reason that we should be using the basic characteristics of asynchronous chat—such as the fact that it allows students and extended amount of time to reflect on their responses—to facilitate such a lesson. I enjoy Black’s article and I appreciate that it contains applicable components I can take away and apply in my own classroom. My concern with this article is that it seems to essentialize the characteristics of good student writing and leaves little room for consideration of these characteristics along the lines of gender, race, or culture. Black mentions that “In particular, discussion among students on specific knowledge has the potential to motivate inquiry and to create a learning context in which collaborative meaning making occurs” (4-5). While this social-constructivist approach fits in well with my own pedagogy, I am concerned that Black is more concerned with students demonstrating critical thought according to Black’s own definition than students considering their individual experiences and the forces that have shaped these in light of the questions at hand. In a way, Black’s scale for grading student responses to asynchronous online discussions forums seems essentialist and current-traditional, a method that does not encourage or foster meaning-making through such discussion. Treading carefully here, it almost seems as if Black believes students are inherently lazy individuals who are not taking advantage of the time table they are given in asynchronous chat situations, and that teachers should do more to encourage them. As Kelly Kinney’s discussion of self-silencing in the online classroom discusses, there could be many alternate explanations for a lack of reflective student responses in an asynchronous forum than Black seems prepared to acknowledge. While I appreciate Black’s discussion of this topic (she is right: not much has been done on asynchronous discussion, a topic important to my discussion of community in the online classroom), the article has its deterministic moments, casting asynchronous chat as the perfect solution to facilitating critical thinking, while ignoring race, gender, and multiculturalism, a fact that is very problematic:

 "In the traditional classroom, discussion is often dominated by the instructor or a few students.        The nature of asynchronous discussion allows all voices to be heard because (a) students are usually required to respond and their participation can be easily documented and (b) those who may be intimidated by speaking in from of their peers or those who need more response time are more easily able to participate" (12).

 

Teaching Composition Online: No Longer the Second Best Choice

Blair, Leslie. "Teaching Composition Online: No Longer the Second Best Choice." Kairos. 8.2. 2003. < http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/8.2/binder.html?praxis/blair/index.html>
(23 September 2009)


In this article, Leslie Blair discusses her experience teaching composition online and in the traditional classroom, arguing that teaching composition online is no longer inferior to teaching composition in the traditional classroom. Blair discusses her position that “there are advantages to teaching writing through a text-based technology,” contextualizing her argument in terms of Bakhtin’s theory of communication, group development, and learning rhetoric online. In her discussion of communication, she contends that student-teacher communication cannot be considered authentic, and that at least in an online setting students responses to teachers are written, providing an additional opportunity for learning. She also indicates that the notion of audience shifts in the online classroom and that this is valuable, a seemingly postmodern pedagogical connection. Blair goes on to recommend small groups as a technique for building community in the online classroom and to underscore the significance of the fact that student perceptions of status based on race, gender, or cultural background in an online classroom become less important.

One of the first things I noticed about Blair’s article is its relationship to Black’s article in as much as both authors underscore the possibilities available to students when they are able to go back and reflect on their posts and the posts of other students:

"Hewett also noted that students have the opportunity to save posts that their peers make to use them as a prompt for further responses and review (as qtd. in Blair). As they put this kind of contemplation into their writing, students begin to internalize considerations about audience and purpose when they write because they have become part of a group that forms their audience." (Screen 2)

Blair makes an interesting point, and her discussion of audience as it is related to community-building and electronic writing is an interesting one. I do feel, however, that Blair becomes a bit too excited about the “new possibilities” in teaching writing online and glosses over some of the problems that can be encountered along the lines of gender and race, student-teacher dynamics, and a reification of traditional views of power and authority associated with the on-ground classroom. I do think Blair’s discussion of using electronic writing and discussions in the traditional classroom is interesting. Overall, this article is helpful in as much as it discusses electronic writing in much more detail, electronic writing being the primary tool available for building community in the online classroom.

Key Elements of Building Online Community: Comparing Faculty and Student Perceptions

Bloom, Linda, John Sherlock, and Pam Vesely. “Key Elements of Building Online Community: Comparing Faculty and Student Perceptions.” MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. 3.3. September 2007. http://jolt.merlot.org/vol3no3/vesely.htm.
(23 September 2009)

This article examines community and community-building in the online classroom. It examines the ways in which community is essential to the learning process by reviewing literature associated with this topic and pointing to the success of non-classroom online communities in terms of the levels at which participants may be engaged with the communities. Additionally, this article discusses and presents the findings of a study by the authors in which fourteen online university classes were examined in terms of community and community-building. The article ends with recommendations by the authors for instructors, administrators, and others who may be interested in this topic.

This article is incredibly helpful in terms of my goals for my project. The literature review may be one of the most useful parts. Here, the authors foreground such information as the number of public and private colleges and universities that offer online courses, as well as the numbers related to dropout rates amongst online learners (“often 10-20 % higher than in traditional courses”). Most of this, as the authors point out, can be attributed to a feeling of isolation amongst learners, which further points to the significance of discussing and researching community in the online classroom. The study conducted by the authors of this article centers on the challenges instructors face when attempting to build community in the online classroom and the problems experienced by students as a result of this: "The present study included both students and instructors and asked whether establishing community in the online classroom was harder or easier and why. Additionally, while many of the variables that impact the development of community in the online classroom have been previously reported, this study sought to identify and compare student and instructor perceptions of what is truly most important" (4).

The findings and conclusions of this study were presented in an effective and clear manner, and give a good idea of the traits that both students and teachers rank as most important in an online classroom in terms of community. I think it would be interesting, in light of research on the ways women function in online communities, to conduct a similar study and breaking down the results in terms of gender.

Postmodern Possibilities in Electronic Conversations

Cooper, Marilyn. “Postmodern Possibilities in Electronic Conversations.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, eds. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999. 140-60.


Marilyn Cooper’s “Postmodern Possibilities in Electronic Conversations” is a mediation on Lester Faigley’s discussion of pedagogy as it relates to “the use of electronic discussions in writing classrooms” (140). Cooper tells us that Faigley believes such a pedagogy lends itself to a postmodern pedagogy. In this article, Cooper attempts to pick up here where Faigley leaves off, suggesting that postmodern pedagogy fits well with an electronic pedagogy and that we should consider postmodern pedagogy in terms of its possibilities for the student and teacher in electronic conversations. Instead of fixating on the nihilistic (a characteristic of which postmodernism is often accused), we should focus on possibilities: “…postmodernist theory has a positive, progressive face—possibilities that open up when we jettison those things that are ‘lost’—and it is those possibilities that I want to examine as they emerge in a pedagogy that employs electronic conversations” (140). Cooper discusses not only the problems teachers encounter in electronic conversations, but also the problems students encounter and the possibility of using these as sites of opportunity for the liberation of both student and teacher, the emergence of a new, electronic pedagogy.

I find Cooper’s article incredibly enlightening and well-written. There are, however, opportunities for the incorporation of more research (especially empirical) and additional information on practical application. In terms of the enlightening aspects of Cooper’s text, I find most useful the revelation that electronic conversations in the classroom (whether an online classroom or a web-enhanced classroom) necessarily shift and alter the dynamic of teacher and student in a way that is at once postmodern and consistent with collaborative, feminist, critical, and social-epistemic pedagogies. As a feminist, collaborative, and social-epistemic pedagogue, I look for ways to approach the teacher/student binary in a way that is, well, less binary. It is difficult in any type of classroom, online or on-ground, to de-center oneself as an authority figure, but, I many ways, the dynamics of the student-teacher relationship are skewed in favor of the teacher, compromising the authenticity of student communications with all members of the class. This is problematic and seemingly impossible to rectify, particularly as female instructors are on shakier ground when it comes to the question of authority. Cooper’s article allows me to see that in electronic conversations, teachers are automatically de-centered as authority figures, their roles taking on a more postmodern position virtually independent of their own actions, something I find exciting. While Cooper’s discussion of the roles of teachers and students in this article is very insightful and persuasive, I would be interested to see more statistics related to this shift. The essay is highly theoretical and is arguably a pedagogical as well. For these reasons, I would appreciate more pragmatic discussion of applicable assignments that support electronic pedagogy. I am very interested in the notion of electronic pedagogy and look forward to exploring and hopefully contributing to this discussion.

Mediating Power: Learning Interfaces, Classroom Epistemology, and the Gaze

DePaw, Kevin and Heather Lettner-Rust. “Mediating Power: Distance Learning Interfaces, Classroom Epistemology, and the Gaze.” Computers and Composition. 26: 2009. 174-189.


This article discusses the ways in which distance learning interfaces reinforce traditional methods of instruction that fail to take into account dynamics of the teacher-student relationship. It discusses how, interestingly, though we have made many advances in the field of distance learning, the way the course rooms are set up is still problematic, if not hegemonic: “We argue that the textual and visual features of the different interfaces lend themselves to specific pedagogical choices while suppressing others and, as a result, articulate certain epistemological philosophies and power relationships between instructors and students” (175). Interfaces are “culturally designed” and influence the way communications take pace and the way instructors teach, as well as who is allowed to contribute to the knowledge created in the course. Acknowledging that “the gaze” of the instructor as enabled through distance learning interfaces is impossible to destroy (the authors say the same about notions of power in the traditional classroom), DePaw and Lettner-Rust argue that this power dynamic can be mediated. They not only discuss and analyze case studies to support their assertions, they also discuss the pedagogical implications of this issue.

This article is useful to an investigation of community in the online classroom in myriad ways. Specifically, it addresses a major problem in the construction of these online communities: they are constructed by teachers based on their ideas of how a classroom should be run by drawing on experience gained teaching in the traditional classroom. Also, even if an instructor intentionally attempts to minimize or negate traditional approaches to teaching that underscore the authority of the instructor and deny the possibility of the student as a contributor to knowledge, the instructor is likely still working within course room spaces and with interfaces designed by course designers or software developers whose own notions of classroom dynamics are informed by their own experiences in the traditional classroom. It seems an impossible situation (though the authors disagree), one definitely at the center of any discussion of online classroom dynamics. In fact, this article problematizes the whole notion of the teacher as “communal architect” in the online classroom (see Ebersole and Woods). This article also offers pedagogical implications, suggesting that this problem basically forces us as educators to reexamine the way we are teaching online, especially in writing courses, in which the authors believe a problem-posing course is better than a “banking-model” course (with which I agree). DePaw and Lettner-Rust’s most valuable assertion is that we need to question why we are using a face-to-face model in the construction of distance-learning interfaces at all, and, in my own view, how this necessarily regulates any community-building in the online classroom above and beyond what any instructor or student can contribute.

Becoming a 'Communal Architect' in the Online Classroom-- Integrating Cognitive and Affective Learning for Maximum Effect in Web-Based Learning

Ebersole, Samuel and Robert Woods.“Becoming a ‘Communal Architect’ in the Online Classroom—Integrating Cognitive and Affective Learning for Maximum Effect in Web-Based Learning.” Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration. 5:1. Spring 2003. State University of West Georgia, Distance Education Center. http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring61/woods61.htm
(20 September 2009)

In this article, Ebersole and Woods discuss what it means to be a “communal architect” through the metaphor of scaffolding. The authors refer to many articles and studies by other scholars who have researched community in the online classroom. The article also points to Climate Theory—a concept from community and social psychology literature—that discusses the variance of psycho-social climates, asserting that “climates are a product of environmental and [individual]s characteristics, and that the relationships between climate, setting, and individuals are reciprocally influential” (2). Ebersole and Woods begin by discussing their concept of the communal scaffolding, transitioning to ways in which instructors can apply various components of the scaffold, and, finally, to the relationship of studies of online communities and climate theory.

This article is very useful in my study of online communities in the online classroom in terms of its offering of applicable strategies for constructing online communities. In a way, it restates or says the same thing as much of the literature on this topic does: asynchronous chat, immediacy, e-mails, and live chat are some of the primary considerations of building community in the online classroom. The useful new concept here is the notion of communal scaffolding itself, a metaphor for teaching techniques that resonates with the notion of scaffolding as a way of building up a student’s ability to understand a topic, an approach commonly employed in tutoring and writing centers. I think this metaphor is useful because it suggests and facilitates a hands-on, pragmatic approach to community building in the online classroom. Also, as I’ve stated in previous annotations, I appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of this article, one that encourages community amongst the various disciplines that can contribute usefully to a discussion of online communities, such as psychology, anthropology, composition and rhetoric, sociology, women’s studies, and communications. My only critique of this article in terms of its usefulness for my purposes is that it seems to gloss over some of the problems in online community-building that affect both student and teacher. Additionally, as with some other articles in this bibliography, it does not mention much about gender, race, or multiculturalism, something I see as necessarily bound up with notions of community in the online classroom.