Writing Inventions: Identities, Technologies, Pedagogies
Scott Lloyd DeWitt
Language: English
Pages: 290
ISBN: 0791450406
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A collection of instructional stories, research, and classroom applications for teachers who use computers in their writing instruction.
The increasing role of computer technology in the classroom has left many teachers searching for resources that will make sense of complex theories and provide them with practical pedagogical direction. Offering instructional stories, histories, and classroom applications, Writing Inventions connects the theoretical aspirations of the field with the craft of innovative composition instruction. Focusing on issues of “invention,” the book explores “writing inventions”—the computer technology that students use to research, read, create, and compose. But “invention” also refers to the rich collection of processes that lead to what is not yet known: topics for writing, personal and professional identities, and new pedagogies. Methods for teaching invention using the World Wide Web are also outlined, arguing that the Web allows students and teachers to see into each other's learning processes. In the end, Writing Inventions tells stories—instructional accounts of computers and teaching writing that balance theory and practice.
“This book fascinated me—especially the blend of personal reflection and the researcher voices. The relationship between reading/writing hypertext is little understood, and this book offers, in the context of invention, a good start in that direction. This is a timely book; there is nothing else like it.” — Nick Carbone, coauthor of Writing Online: A Student's Guide to the Internet and World Wide Web
the active and the passive, when such a distinction is not as clear as one may think. Teachers claim we want our students to be active, not passive learners, as if our students are either one or the other because of a simple change in cognitive processes. I would argue that our students are active creatures in many regards and that what we consider to be their passivity is instead quite deliberate. Our constant push toward what we consider active learning may fail our students in an important
(1980) model of cognitive processes that focused on the basic processes of the individual writer who is constructing a written text. Other work has attempted to identify that which is present and common to all information processing acts. These theories emphasize general INVENTING INVENTION 47 knowledge as problem-solving and “[define] expertise in writing as the ability to bring to a writing task certain rich, well-developed, general strategies that guide the process and increase the chances
research resources. • Respond to CmD assignment based on your reading assignment. • Locate three articles for your collection of research resources. • All articles should be “substantive.” • All articles must be signed (no AP articles, for example). 85 86 Writing Inventions: Identities, Technologies, Pedagogies Thursday, 9 February 1995 • Write at 3–5 sentence summary of the three articles you located. Mail these summaries to your research team. • Check e-mail. Based on the 3–5 sentence
Internet. Certainly the industry has boomed as people tuned into the Web. Whereas many quickly learned how to find specific information important to their personal lives, its popularity and its potential to bring a new kind of play into their lives sent thousands of people to electronic superstores to purchase their first home computers. In fact, systems, like WebTV, have been designed for Web use only. Surfing the Web has become a hobby to many, and whereas there have been no landmark studies to
site. Mostly, though, a breadcrumb trail wouldn’t show me how the student was experiencing the Web: what the student had noticed, how the student was dealing with the chaotic, fragmented nature of the Web, how the student had or had not reflected on his or her experience, how the student’s cognitive processes may have been in conflict or in harmony with the structure of the technology. What was a series of disconnected snapshots for the student would have been the same for me, also. My close