For Claudia, Kye, Upendo, Fang, and Rocky: What are your experiences
teaching with and/or using Wikis or Google Docs? What do you think are their
advantages or disadvantages? How does
this study relate to the two studies we read of face-to-face collaborative
writing? What are some of the more significant similarities and
differences?
For our experimental online collaborative/cooperative writing pair, Amanda and Carrie: =
What do you think are their
advantages or disadvantages of using wikis or google docs for writing or teaching writing? How does
this study relate to the two studies we read of face-to-face collaborative
writing? What are some of the more significant similarities and
differences?
I have some experience using Google Doc to write group papers, for communication while organizing a conference, and when taking notes that I will share with another person; all of which were cooperative but not collaborative. Other than that, I must admit that my experience is rather limited. As for the article, I was surprised each group generally demonstrated one interaction pattern (e.g. collective contributing/mutually supportive, authoritative/responsive, or dominant/withdrawn). I also found it interesting that the number of student contributions seemed to be higher when students were collaborating or when they intended to work as a group rather than individuals.
ReplyDeleteThree advantages of this study relate to the space, asynchronous nature, and different perspectives. There is quite a bit of digital space available that could let the students organize their work in different ways. Also wikipages seem more accessible (even though one commented otherwise) because people could access them when it aligned with their schedule and it also provided some time for them to think about how they wanted to respond. Most of the students mentioned that the task provided a chance to learn for the different perspectives of the other group members because they were interested in what the others had to contribute.
The main disadvantage I saw was the lack of face-to-face interaction. It is possible that the lack to face-to-face interaction led to less collaboration because the students were more comfortable with one person taking charge and the other following, or that they were not held accountable for their contribution. Also I wonder if the interaction in the dominant/withdrawn situation would have been different if they had talked in-person. I know there are times when I read something online and interpret it differently than the other person intended. I can see where maybe this is what happened in that situation.
This article relates to the others by examining how people can write collaboratively in groups and how those social interactions might function as a scaffold where they communally build on what the others bring to the table. Because of this similar focus many of the implication can also apply to this article, even though the authors caution about making pedagogical assertions.
However, I think a very important difference in this article is the setting where the writing takes place. Even though there were mixed results regarding how the space was used, the setting is important to consider because of the push many teachers face for more technology friendly activities and the use of the internet. Additionally, I found the different group dynamics interesting because of the variation and I felt as though it also began to answer some of the questions I have regarding individual characteristics in collaboration. I felt as though I could read into the interactions more and possibly see some personality differences between the different students.
ReplyDeleteI never used wiki in my own classrooms, but I used Google Docs as a co-constructed writing tool in my master’s program. Even now, I still feel fascinated about its moving flow when students are typing, all of the ideas are shown at the same time. In fact, I benefitted a lot from using Google Docs. First, because each student’s efforts can be clearly shown on this shared website, I felt myself carry more responsibility to contribute to the writing text. Second, reading classmates’ insights really provided me with a broad and deeper understanding. I was able to think about the target notion in a more critical way. Thus, in my experience with the wiki, I would agree that the sociocultural theory helps explain what undergoes the learning space, such as scaffolding, taking social roles, and motivation.
In terms of the disadvantages of the wiki, students who are put in a group of dominant partners are more likely to withdraw than students in a face-to-face group. This is because the notion of “silence” is viewed very differently and withdrawing from one group can cause different degree of social breakdown in two settings. Therefore, it explains why in the dominant-withdrawn group, there can be no response from other group members and people could reject the language revisions made by other members. As the two authors pointed out in the end, it is necessary to group students based on their degree of familiarity.
However, this disadvantage can also be an advantage of the wiki. Because turn-taking is a very important social reaction in daily conversations, students may not be able to delve further into a new perspective or provide stronger evidence to support their own thoughts before reacting to others’ comments. This could result in a superfluous or basic level of revisions. However, online writing offers each writer a personal and safe space to remain own positions or thoroughly considering other alternatives. Rather than spending some amount of time and energy in immediate social interaction, they can put more efforts in individual thinking. The idea completeness can be more easily found, because each writer is an individual and expert writer in this process. I would love to see if there are any studies that compare the quality of writing between face-to-face writing and online writing settings, if both groups adopt a collaborative orientation.
I am very impressed by how participants perceived their collaborative writing experiences shown in table 4 in this study, because it represents a major difference from the previous two studies. Because I am especially interested in knowing whether participants benefitted from learning different writing strategies, I was astonished to see that almost no strategies were learned in this process. Given that all participants are in the intermediate level and have similar English learning background, their experiences with second language writing may be not much different. This would be similar with what Carrie once said about her Language and Learning class that all students are native English speakers and all have high school learning experiences of Spanish, there are less moments of revelation occurred when students sharing their second language learning backgrounds. Imagine that participants from different L1 background and different L2 learning experiences (or more specifically, writing experiences) are grouped together, is this possible for them to learn about different writing strategies from each other? The answer, I think, is yes. Because grouping is a very common pedagogical skill used by teachers, I am interested to know if a lot of studies have been conducted to investigate how to group students when teachers want to achieve certain goal(s) in writing.
Given that I don’t have experience teaching or using Wikis, I am going to concentrate my response this week to the last two questions of the prompt: How does this study relate to the two studies we read of face-to-face collaborative writing? What are some of the more significant similarities and differences?
ReplyDeleteMy first thought after finishing reading Li & Zhu’s study (2013) was that it is a great complement to the studies on collaborative writing we have read so far. It relates to Storch & Aldosari and Dobao in that students from similar cultural, linguistic and education backgrounds had to collaboratively write a text in a foreign language. In this case, it was English as a Foreign language. The main difference was, this was an asynchronous collaboration. Students were able to connect to the wikis and participate on their own time. Nevertheless, even if time limitations were less strict, they had more tasks to complete. The authors concluded that the students’ lack of presence is not exactly positive when it comes to collaborative writing, and that it is important to keep students accountable by giving individual evaluations. This would promote “equal contribution and reciprocal interaction” (p.78).
I was glad to read the student participants were interviewed, which is what I thought was lacking from the previous studies – students’ perceptions of the experience. Having their insight shines a different light on the whole experience. Interestingly, the students from the dominant/withdrawn group were the ones who admitted not learning much from the experience, even though they believed the experience they gained writing perspective.
I am glad the authors explained the differences between equality and mutuality, although I am not sure I still understand them completely. I would appreciate it if we discuss some of that on our class on Tuesday.
As I read the study, I also kept thinking on how different it is to write by oneself in front of a computer, as opposed to sitting in a group or a pair together on a table. The immediate response isn’t there when working asynchronously, and I wonder if the groups in this study would have shown similar patterns of interaction if they had worked together in person. One of the suggestions for future research that the authors include is to investigate if students transfer the skills learned in the collaboration to their individual writing. I believe that to be crucial, because even if there are many benefits to collaboration, individual writing needs to be taken into account in order to improve writing teaching practices.
I took the second language assessment course from Dr. Plakans last year. We had the assignment to post summaries and opinions after reading each article by using Wikis. Whenever a student posted a summary of an article, other students need to respond to it. The participation in this discussion board in Wiki was graded. The benefit of computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies is that people can access the system anywhere, anytime. In addition, by looking at the discussion, people can learn the way of developing ideas and the manner of responding one another. However, when one of the respondents showed disagreement or incomprehensiveness toward one’s post, or reiterate the comments from previous comments, the thread of the discussion was discontinued unless someone (not original post writer) tried to compromise between an original post and opposite opinion. The disadvantage of using the Wiki is that the number of responses becomes a sensitive issue for a writer who originally posts the comments.
ReplyDeleteOne similarity between the face-to-face studies and the Wiki study that I found was that both studies examined the interaction patterns among students, not between teachers and students. Another similarity between both the face-to-face studies and the Wiki study studies is that they examined students’ different proficiency factors influence their group dynamics and individual writing work. They both divide the groups and compare the groups. The obvious difference between the studies is the medium that they used (e.g. face to face vs. Computer software). One of the differences between both studies is the methodology (Mixed methods vs. Case study) and the settings (classroom vs. outside of class) that they used. For the Wiki study, participation was voluntary, not like an obligation (e.g. regular courses for students). In addition, the follow-up interview from students was a great source to know the reason of different interactions among participants in each group. Thus, the relationship between researcher and participants were more subjective regarding analyzing the data for each group (vs. analyzing LREs) because Li and Zhu (2013) focused on individual participant engagement and development process.
Unfortunately I haven’t taught my students using Google Docs but, I think it will be a good idea for me to try. The advantage of the study is that, Wiki is easily accessible by students. Students from different countries can interact easily as if they are in the same country. This means there is no need for people meeting face to face to make interaction.
ReplyDeleteThe disadvantage of the study was, due to lack of face to face interaction some students withdraw themselves from the group. In my own experience last year I was involved in a study and it took place online. Unfortunately I decided to withdraw myself because I didn’t see the importance of communicating to people I do not know. It seemed like there wasn’t a good collaboration. But, I also found that there was nothing motivating me to be in that class at all. Since a certain student seemed to dominate the group.
I can relate this article with the past articles through group collaborative writing. Whereby, all participants get the chance to give out their opinions and idea on the topic. Members of the group tend to build an idea from one person, which help them get a good flow of ideas for the topic. For example in Excerpt1, the students a student suggest that they should think of the topic with two aspects advantages and disadvantages and finally the group agrees.
On my opinion the difference between wikis group collaborative writing and the previous articles is, Wikis students communicate and share ideas through online, while in the other articles students do a collaboration through face to face interaction. The similarity is that in all the articles students have the degree of control over the task and the engagement in each other contribution.