Conversation Today

Today we discussed how we are defining our concepts. I will put our ideas below VERY informally.

We are incorporating within our epistemological framework the ideas of active learning, experience, constructing knowledge, and critical thinking. We will look further at social contructionism and Vygotsky.

We are first examining how the process influenced us, and also then applying this and connecting to our classroom.

In relation to assessment, we believe it is necessary to look at alternative approaches. Many people try to use traditional assessment tools, which can be ineffective. Sabatino discussed multi-trait rubrics which he will look at further.

In the data analysis, we currently believe we have found three important thread:
1. How it influenced the writing process, including exploration of ideas and focusing ideas.
2. Technology - how did it influence writing.
The blog allowed us both to work at times convenient to us. It forced us to keep working, and there was a little bit of "peer pressure" to keep going (in the most positive sense, of course). We had to allow for things not to work perfectly, but at times this was a positive influence (google docs, clustering, sorting info, etc).
Technology helped us with freewriting, revision, reflection, encouraging to keep working, continuing dialogue, reflection from dialogue.
3. Community

Some benefits were that we found new sources, considered alternate ideas. We will look at internal (local) collaboration and global collaboration. What we experienced caused discussion, confusion, and growth. We can see how having the blog open may cause complexity that basic writers would struggle with. We were able to come back to our ideas and not lost steam. We discussed the idea of whether the blog encourages open discussion or if there is self-censorship because we know there are many different audiences - including each other, the instructor, and other readers. This will need to be addressed in the paper.

Blog allowed us to collaborate better but to get full experience of collaborative writing we can't forget the importance of F2F conversation. However, if we were collaborating w/o blog, there would be different problems to attend to.

Sharing the blog promotes the idea of partnership, no one owns the project, the voices are all there, and we are contributing to it.