Sustainable Community Collaborative Writing Blog

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The Case Study of a Young Authors’ Camp

When asked to design and teach a Young Authors’ Camp, I immediately brainstormed what might engage young students to write during their summer vacation. It didn’t take me long to realize the power of technology and so was born the Texas Bluebonnet Writing Project’s High-Tech Young Authors’ Camp.

Even before camp, I extended the lines of virtual communication by contacting parents of registered campers through email. I needed to gain their permission for their children to create a weblog as well as information on an email address that could be used for created such blog. I also asked for further information from the parents about their children and passed along the nuts and bolts about the week to come. I feel the virtual communication really sets the tone for the entire experience.

I also create an informational blog for both campers and parents where what we studied, homework, and other helpful tips are posted. Both parents and students are invited to review this page at any time for reference. This would be for the majority of campers, their introduction to the world of blogging. I would use this page to get them to log in, navigate, and understand what a blog is.

This is where the patience comes to play. Having worked extensively with blogs, I needed to remind myself that many campers weren’t even certain of how to get onto the Internet. From experience, the more help the better. This year, I dedicated about 15 minutes to find and get onto the camp blog.

Element 1: Aesthetically Pleasing

After obtaining the permission and address to create the blogs for the campers, I set upon my mission to create the accounts. I tried to choose titles and passwords that would suit the camper, and I randomly chose the templates for how the blog would look onscreen.

I found out, however, that the young campers preferred choosing their own titles, passwords, and of course, look of their blogs. We took at least another 20 minutes while campers played around with their blogs, changing passwords, names, and especially templates. Originally, I thought I was doing the right thing by creating their blogs for them. I wanted to save time.

I realize now that this taking time to create and design their own blogs is a very important step for the campers. They needed to have a sense of that ownership for their own pages. They needed to make their own choices on what they could remember for passwords, how they would be seen for their usernames, and how their blogs looked for the templates. The extra 20 minutes were well spent because before long, campers were calling them “MY page.”

Element 2: Moral/Ethical Connections with members of the community

With a 5-day time period, one wonders how connected campers will feel. It’s up to me to set the pace and tone for the writing community. For writing, in particular, since it is such a personal process, many people feel anxiety to share their work. They may be even more reluctant to hear feedback because they are so accustomed to hearing what needs to be corrected instead of what is good about the piece.

I start by sharing my own writing. I read it and allow them to think about it, and then, I set up some norms for providing constructive feedback. These are reminders to state what was appreciated in the piece and if there’s a part that cam be improved or clarified, the audience member can ask about those items in question format and in a specific nature. For example, instead of saying, “The beginning was boring.” The protocols I presented would remind listeners or readers to say, “How could the beginning of the piece attract our attention more? Is there a way to jump into some action while also setting the stage?”

As we review the Providing Constructive Feedback Guidelines, I ask students why they think these are important. I got answers like, “So the writer wants to share their work” or “So writers know exactly what they can work on.” I remind them, that it is difficult to share writing so we need to be as positive as possible.

The campers then use those guidelines to provide feedback to me, and I revise my writing accordingly. I do this via blogs so campers can see the writing process in action. Then, it’s time for the students to try it.

I have never experienced such excitement about writing. We actually did conferencing about their pieces online on the campers’ individual blogs. Students were waiting for their feedback. They were reminding each other and me to read their latest comments and latest revisions. They felt committed to providing their peers with valuable feedback. They felt invested to conference with one another to see if their pieces were making more sense not only to themselves as writers but also to the readers.

This is a very difficult task to accomplish, but somehow, the blogs aided in this process. I think students knew their feedback was being considered, and they also knew that their names were linked to the comments made. They had ownership of their feedback, their revisions as well as the writing process, and in our writing community.

Element 3: Non-linear/hierarchical Relationships and opportunities for Communication


Element 4: Grounded in Constructivism

Abstract

This paper examines the theoretical principles, aesthetic design, technological tools and components necessary to create polysynchronous professional collaboration and community building through a case study analysis of a virtual learning community developed for an affiliate site of the National Writing Project.


Introduction

Online and on the ground, university graduate courses in education often go to great lengths to create learning environments which promote collaboration, support facilitation, and build community. Supported by principles of social constructivism, professors and students mediate learning in this nurturing environment where knowledge is transacted, not simply transmitted, by active, engaged learners, who collaborate on problem solving which is contextualized in real world situations. In this environment, trust and respect is carefully built as both teachers and students emphasize the processes of learning as well as the product. But what happens when the course is over? When the students in an online environment don’t have their threaded discussion boards or chat rooms housed within the courseware or the on the ground students have left the classroom and dispersed to their individual places of work, how has the knowledge they have mediated integrated into their praxis as they recursively apply theory, reflect, and build theory.

Review of the Literature

Cooper (2006) posits that it is important for students to take part not just during their tenure of a course or program of study, but to grow into a community which will help implement and sustain similar elements of support beyond the virtual or physical classroom. This sustainability will potentially enable students to continue to grow and develop within the context of their own learning community enables students to become mentors to students who follow them, and indeed, mentor educators as well. This allows relationships to evolve beyond the typical teacher-student relationship into a growing collaborative where everyone participates to the best of their ability in developing the collaborative process.

The virtual learning community offers the opportunity for this sustainability to occur. In Leadership for the Schoolhouse ,Sergiovanni (1996) offers four theoretical elements necessary for a sustained learning community. He asserts that school-based learning communities are shaped by theory and form; moral connections; non linear relationships, and social constructivist principles. Those same principles can be applied to virtual communities which extend from school to form a sustainable community of learners, practitioners and leaders.

First, the theory and form of the community should be aesthetically pleasing. The language and form should be appealing. Students, professors, and interested professionals should want to “visit” this site. Not only should it be easily navigable, but it should be inviting with images that the site participants can relate to easily and in which they are motivated to participate.

Secondly, moral/ethical connections within this community must be established in order to create a recognition of common shared values and commitments that will propel learning and new knowledge. What connections can be established in this community that correlate to shared values and practices in the daily lives of the virtual inhabitants? Virtual elements of a learning community can house the functions that will allow participants to engage in activities which will in turn allow them opportunity for the necessary recognition of shared values and goals.

Thirdly, the non linear/hierarchical relationships that exist in the social constructivist learning community can be supported by shared opportunities for communication in the virtual learning community. Using the tools that technology offers today—blogs, pod casts, vlogs, chat rooms, threaded discussion areas, the leadership role in learning communities can be shared. When supported by common ethics, shared purpose, trust and respect, any of the participants can initiate learning, encourage others, ask questions, and share experience.

Fourth, Segiovanni (1996) believes the learning community should be grounded in the principles of constructivism. Learners should have an opportunity to mediate knowledge within a social context. Multiple intersections of thought and language should exist to offer richly complex opportunities for knowledge to be created and sustained. The virtual learning community can be designed and populated with technology tools that support these intersections of social experience creating as Vygotsky believes a “culture which is the product of social life and social activity (1981, p. 168).

Can the distance learning or on the ground classroom evolve into a culture or community of reflective learners who share common interests and values through non linear relationships supported by opportunities to engage in socially mediated learning via the technology and tools available in the virtual learning community?

Methodology

This case study will examine a virtual learning community that is an outgrowth of a local affiliate of the National Writing Project. The National Writing Project has been steadily providing excellence through its annual Summer Invitational Institute. These institutes are housed within universities, and supported by matching federal and university funds. Students earn six graduate hours for five weeks of participation in a Summer Institute. Using a teachers-teaching-teachers model, the Writing Project provides participating in-service teachers with opportunities to come together in a supportive environment to examine the theory, research, practice, and challenges of teaching writing, while at the same time honing their own writing skills and developing their leadership abilities.

The Bluebonnet Writing Project is the local affiliate of the National Writing Project that will be the subject of this case study analysis. Founded on the belief that that literacy is essentially a social practice where reading, writing, speaking, and listening occur out of a “rich and complex web of immediate, living needs, purposes, meanings and relationships” (Zemelman and Daniels, 1988) the writing project develops deep community roots during the five weeks the participants are engaged in the Summer Institute, but questioning how those tenets of community could be sustained and built upon once the graduate students/in service teachers went back to their classrooms scattered throughout the large Dallas/ Fort Worth Metroplex and beyond led us to the only viable option we could conceptualize—a virtual learning community.

In order to have a sense of community space where we could interact with one another, we created a virtual community, the Bluebonnet Village,http://www.txbluebonnetwp.org. In this village we are constructing virtual space that looks like elements of a real village, and within this space we have the virtual presence of our community’s many functions.

This proposed paper will analyze the virtual village in terms of Sergiovanni’s (1996) theoretical principles of aesthetics, moral commitment, non linear relationships and shared power in a virtual social context. A description of the aesthetic design and technological construction of this village will be written by the graphic artist and web designer. Two directors of the Bluebonnet Writing Project will describe and analyze the virtual village for opportunities of moral commitment, non linear relationships and opportunities for social exchange in a virtual learning environment. This paper is anticipated to be the first in a series which begins with the theoretical and actual construction of this virtual learning community and then follows the “life” of the village charting its growth as a community of learners and hopefully a community of leaders.


References

Cooper, Jeff (2006) Educational MUVES: Virtual Learning Communities. Last Retrieved on
April 27, 2006 http://education.ed.pacificu.edu/lab/EducationalMUVES2.htm

Vygotsky, L. (1986) Thought and Language. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Sergiovanni, T.J. (1996). Leadership for the schoolhouse. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Publishers.

Zemelman, S. & H. Daniels. (1988) A Community of Writers: Teaching Writing in the Junior
and Senior High School. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.