Using Wikipedia to Teach Written Health Communication

Unlike first-year writing courses, upper-division writing courses often require students to engage in discipline specific writing. In the author's upper-division course, Writing in the Health Professions, students examine health literacy as it pertains to both oral and written patient-provider communication. Students edit and expand a Wikipedia article for the final course assignment. The advantages of this assignment are threefold. First, students write for an authentic audience, decreasing student apathy. Second, students engage civically, improving health information accessed by millions of people across the world. Finally, students improve content of existing articles and broaden the scope of new articles written, leading to more diverse content and perspectives. In this chapter, the author discusses the above assignment, providing descriptions of scaffolding activities. Potential drawbacks of using Wikipedia to teach students how to write using plain language is discussed, in addition to strategies that might limit these difficulties.

Using Twitter to Scaffold English Composition

This chapter explores the idea, and offers three real-life, classroom tested assignments, of using the rules of social media, specifically Twitter, to teach students the rhetorical moves needed to write essays of college length and quality. The assignments provide first-year composition students the tools necessary to read an academic article, understand the rhetoric behind it, and apply rhetorical strategies it to his or her writing. The three assignments: 1) rhetorically analyze Twitter and create a formula for an effective tweet; 2) rhetorically analyzing an academic article 140 characters at a time; and 3) rhetorically analyzing a student's own paper using these same 140-character sound bites, have shown to put students in a position to be successful in the academy. Each assignment has been fully vetted over three years, with a myriad of student examples. This paper shows that the rules of Twitter can be used academically to provide a knowledge base and scaffolding for student writers.

Designing a Wiki-Based Course for Enhancing the Practice of Writing Skills in the 21st Century

This chapter describes an intervention of a wiki-based course to enhance the practice of academic writing through the process approach. This course was experimented on a freshmen year class of medical students learning English for specific purposes at a university in Saudi Arabia. This chapter draws on the relevant theories and their relationship to the practice of wikis in learning academic writing. Wikis have been introduced into the teaching of writing to afford collaborative assistance and social support. Accordingly, the chapter demonstrates the structure of the course and details the systematic organization between the in-class teaching and on-wiki practice. The intervention of a wiki-based writing course gives emphasis on the background of the tasks assigned. It points out the essential characteristics of the structure of wiki interface that would enable learners to accomplish the process-oriented wiki-mediated collaborative writing (PWMCW) tasks. This new practice reveals the evaluation of this course with its writing tasks, based on the learners' perspectives.

From Expository Blog to Engaged E-Portfolio

This chapter illustrates a student-centered pedagogy in process through the example of an electronic portfolio final assignment in two First-Year Writing courses. The philosophy behind the assignment is based in cultural studies, constructivist pedagogy, and multimodal studies. If students learn by doing, they also learn about culture through critique, public writing, and reflection. Students can thus become engaged as writers and citizens through constructing web-based texts focused on social issues and written from personal perspectives.

Blog Love

Despite claims of a decades-long history of multimodal instructional activities, Composition Studies scholars are still slow to embrace many web-based, social media technology tools to help realize traditional goals of the college writing classroom. Microblogging (Twitter) and blogging (WordPress) activities are effective technology companions that support collaborative learning, critical research, and analytical writing models. This chapter suggests online reading comprehension and critical literacy models as guides for microblogging and blogging lesson design. Finally, instructor commentary and student samples from two assignments, (a) blogging communities and (b) using Twitter to critically analyze a text, are offered to illustrate the aforementioned application.

Networked Digital Spaces

As the landscape for communication changes with new and evolving digital technologies, the format for college composition classrooms must change and adapt as well. If we are moving towards compositions that are created by and mediated through a screen, we must adopt new approaches for talking about and teaching these new forms of language and communication. During the fall 2014 semester, I was given the opportunity to teach a composition class focused on digital rhetoric. As a facet of the classroom experience, my students created and used Twitter accounts for fictional characters. Utilizing Twitter within the composition classroom allowed students to compose as a part of a much larger network of actors that interact with the texts they create. As a form of networked communication, the compositions created by students through this medium demanded interaction and engagement in a way that a classroom composition, shared only between student and instructor, does not.

#WordUp!

In this chapter, the author argues that although integrating online social media networks into a traditional writing classroom seems timely, cutting edge, and apropos to students' current past-time activities, teachers have the opportunity to create more meaningful classroom activities with social media if they first: consider students' trepidation regarding such non-traditional classroom activities; and second: realize socially-networked students don't necessarily translate into career-ready students. By way of two in-class Q&A sessions, the author discovers that her Technical Writing students need less instruction on how to use social media academically, and more instruction on how to use social media to brand and market themselves professionally. In a chapter grounded in student response, readers receive her student feedback about the effects of integrating social media networks into their writing classroom in an effort to assist teachers more purposely integrate social media into their traditional classroom spaces.

Teaching Casual Writing for Professional Success with Twitter

Using social media to construct a digital, professional presence for the job search is a necessity in today's labor market. Millennials are skilled in using social media for personal purposes but cannot immediately intuit how to use familiar social media outlets in professional contexts. Writing instructors can guide students in enacting an online, professional presence through digitally mediated communication practices that increasingly are seen as valuable in the workplace. Instead of training students away from using “textese,” instructors should help students develop an abbreviated writing style that is strategic, consistent, and responsive to the needs of their audience. Twitter is the best social media platform in which to help students achieve these learning goals. This chapter provides readers with a description of a capstone, problem-based learning assignment in which students use Twitter to market their professional selves, network, and improve their digital workplace writing skills.

Creating Meaning for Millennials

Despite the Millennial's growing attraction to social media technologies, composition instruction has yet to fully explore the potential of these technologies as resources rather than hindrances to instruction. As instructors of composition, then, it seems logical to apply what we know about these dominant rhetorical and pedagogical theories of the 20th century to the prospective use of social media to better our own pedagogies. Employing the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin's social construction of knowledge and Louise Rosenblatt's student-centered pedagogy, the author explores the many complementary uses of social media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter in the composition classroom in order to generate a new model of instruction – one which challenges traditional, unilateral exchanges of knowledge and centers on a dialogical, student-centered model of composition instruction.

Socializing Composition

The goal of this chapter is to act as a primer for scholars looking start working with social networking site (SNS) in the composition classroom. This chapter focuses on research regarding aspects of SNS use in and out of the classroom, such as identity, rhetorical/audience awareness, civic engagement, and SNS pedagogy. This chapter also relies on current discourse, as well as the author's own SNS experiences, to share lists of best practices and SNS activities in the composition classroom. This chapter ends with a call for future research that includes continued efforts to interact more directly with students to learn with them about their use and views of SNS in and out of the composition classroom.