Article Review #1: "Decentered, Disconnected, and Digitized: The Importance of Shared Space"

Article #1:

Brunk-Chavez, B. and Miller, S. J. (2007). Decentered, Disconnected, and Digitized: The Importance of Shared Space. Kairos, 11(2). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/11.2/index.html

I discovered "Decentered, Disconnected, and Digitized: The Importance of Shared Space" in a cursory search of back issues of the online journal Kairos, and the promise of the title coupled with the ingenuity of the web-text format piqued my curiosity. This study looked at six courses using online writing instruction; half were f2f in a wired lab, and the other half were hybrid courses. Data was collected through teacher observation and through two student surveys administered online.

The authors are quick to situate themselves in the discourse of collaborative pedagogy. Citing standards like Kenneth Bruffee, Kathleen Blake Yancey, and Lester Faigley*, they quickly establish the terms for their model of collaboration (and remind the reader of the distinction between collaboration and cooperation). The authors also engage more current scholarship about online writing instruction (Hewett and Ehmann, 2005; Paloff and Pratt, 2001 and 2005*). The authors, then, reflect upon their findings in the context of both collaborative pedagogy in general and also more recent pedagogy about writing in digital spaces.

Two of their conclusions struck me as quite salient. First, they note their own surprise at the students' opinions of and reactions to the notion of collaboration:

Oddly (for us at least), we found that our students clearly desired working in groups and collaborative environments, and generally preferred doing so in many cases. Why then didn’t more of the instructors participating in the study incorporate more collaborative learning activities within their courses?

Brunk-Chavez and Miller quickly attempt to answer their own question here with the hypothesis that the responsibility may lie with the instructors, and this seems of particular interest when we consider the power differential and our own assumptions about students' preferences. For a long time, we as instructors have projected on to our student the opinion that group work is somehow undesirable. My hunch has always been that even though students sometimes bemoan "group work," many of them realize that they reap the benefits of the social interaction and the construction of knowledge that collaboration allows.

Second, Brunk-Chavez and Miller make the assertion early on that "a digitized classroom creates and maintains shared spaces in ways that a f2f classroom cannot." Although verifying just how (and how much) this statement holds true would certainly be a herculean task, the rewards of such labor would be immeasurable. Thus, this contention merits further attention and discussion, and I hope that future researchers will continue to explore the benefits, limitations, and implications of space in OWI.

Unfortunately, the study itself proved fairly inadequate, and I must admit to being somewhat disappointed in the methodology and the conclusions the study offers. For reasons not fully explained by the authors, only 57 of the study's 150 participants answered the first survey, but then 117 of the participants responded to the second survey. As the authors point out, this prevents them from being able to draw conclusions about change over time or to make connections even about general student perception (after all, it is impossible to determine the overlap between the first group of 57 and the second group of 117).

This leads me to what is perhaps my most pressing question: is there reliable empirical evidence about collaboration in teaching writing at a distance? Many articles have bemoaned the lack of actual empirical studies as the basis for sound pedagogy, and even Brunk-Chavez and Miller themselves make mention of Hewett and Ehmann's admonition of "the relatively low value given to proving claims made for social constructivism" in OWI (2005). I hope that a deeper survey of the literature will lead me to the kinds of research that raise the bar for what empirical data for composition studies should look like.

*I have noted the following works that were cited in the Brunk-Chavez and Miller web-text; their complete Works Cited list is available through their web-text:

Bruffee, K. (1999). Collaborative learning: Higher education, interdependence, and the authority of knowledge. (2nd ed.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

Faigley, L. (1992). Fragments of rationality: Postmodernity and the subject of composition. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press.

Hewett, B., & Ehmann, C. (2005). Preparing educators for online writing instruction: Principles and process. Urbana: NCTE.

Palloff, R., & Pratt, K. (2001). Lessons from the cyberspace classroom: The realities of online teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Palloff, R., & Pratt, K. (2005). Collaborating online: Learning together in community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Yancey, K. B. & Spooner, M. (1998). A single good mind: collaboration, cooperation, and the writing self. College Composition and Communication, 49(1), 45-62.