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Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia
Winner of the MLA's Mina P. Shaugnessy Prize for an outstanding work in the fields of language, culture, literacy, or literature with strong application to the teaching of English.
Focusing largely on the controversial website Wikipedia, the author explores the challenges confronting teachers of college writing in the increasingly electronic and networked writing environments their students use every day. Rather than praising or condemning that site for its role as an encyclopedia, Cummings instead sees it as a site for online collaboration between writers and a way to garner audience for student writing. Applying an understanding of Commons-Based Peer Production theory, as developed by Yochai Benkler, this text is arranged around the following -- Commons-Based Peer Production is a novel economic phenomenon which informs our current teaching model and describes a method for making sense of future electronic developments. -- College writers are motivated to do their best work when they write for an authentic audience, external to the class. -- Writing for a networked knowledge community invites students to participate in making knowledge, rather than only consuming it. -- A plan for integrating networked writing for an external audience helps students understand the transition from high school to college writing. -- Allowing students to review and self-select points of entry into electronic discourse fosters "laziness," or a new work dynamic where writers seek to better understand their own creativity in terms of a project's demands. Lazy Virtues offers networked writing assignments to foster development of student writers by exposing them to the demands of professional audiences, asking them to identify and assess their own creative impulses in terms of a project's needs, and removing the writing teacher from the role of sole audience.
Focusing largely on the controversial website Wikipedia, the author explores the challenges confronting teachers of college writing in the increasingly electronic and networked writing environments their students use every day. Rather than praising or condemning that site for its role as an encyclopedia, Cummings instead sees it as a site for online collaboration between writers and a way to garner audience for student writing. Applying an understanding of Commons-Based Peer Production theory, as developed by Yochai Benkler, this text is arranged around the following -- Commons-Based Peer Production is a novel economic phenomenon which informs our current teaching model and describes a method for making sense of future electronic developments. -- College writers are motivated to do their best work when they write for an authentic audience, external to the class. -- Writing for a networked knowledge community invites students to participate in making knowledge, rather than only consuming it. -- A plan for integrating networked writing for an external audience helps students understand the transition from high school to college writing. -- Allowing students to review and self-select points of entry into electronic discourse fosters "laziness," or a new work dynamic where writers seek to better understand their own creativity in terms of a project's demands. Lazy Virtues offers networked writing assignments to foster development of student writers by exposing them to the demands of professional audiences, asking them to identify and assess their own creative impulses in terms of a project's needs, and removing the writing teacher from the role of sole audience.
216 pages, Paperback
First published December 15, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 20, 2012
The book's title could just as easily be "Teaching Writing in Wikipedia", although everything discussed can apply to any collaborative writing environment, specifically open systems that support "Commons-Based Peer Production" (CBPP). Cummings opens with an straightforward explanation of the ideas Yochai Benkler presented in his 2002 article,
Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm
, which popularized CBPP and posited a model of human behavior based on the economic theory of Ronald Coase. He also introduces the concept of "laziness" as applied to the hacker community's propensity to re-use prior work as a basis for new projects.
It all comes together, as the author works out the motivation and reasoning that can propel students to write for a public audience on a site like Wikipedia, where their contributions are small fragments of a larger oeuvre. His focus is on the freshman composition classroom, and he offers model assignments, case studies and explores approaches to assessment and analysis.
If you have ever considered incorporating Wikipedia authorship into a composition class (or any humanities class, conceivably), you ought to read this book. It'll save you a lot of time. For those exploring the use of more limited or closed wiki environments than the 800 pound gorilla of Wikipedia, you may find this less directly useful, but it contains good insights that can help your peer writing pedagogy.
It all comes together, as the author works out the motivation and reasoning that can propel students to write for a public audience on a site like Wikipedia, where their contributions are small fragments of a larger oeuvre. His focus is on the freshman composition classroom, and he offers model assignments, case studies and explores approaches to assessment and analysis.
If you have ever considered incorporating Wikipedia authorship into a composition class (or any humanities class, conceivably), you ought to read this book. It'll save you a lot of time. For those exploring the use of more limited or closed wiki environments than the 800 pound gorilla of Wikipedia, you may find this less directly useful, but it contains good insights that can help your peer writing pedagogy.
December 23, 2016
"Ironically, operating systems have become so standardized that most computer users are scarcely aware of their existence"
Standardized means consensus. And while replacing a pedal on my bike requires the same tool for almost all makes of bikes, the same web browser has to have one team for each supported operating system and the features can differ in the sense that one system has it, another doesn't and the third will have it work differently. User awareness, on the other hand, has nothing to do with standardization, and has a lot with ergonomics.
Cummings is a veteran bureaucrat, specialized in make believe "I can train". He barely understands the tech side, being a mere ignorant user qualified to use a very user-friendly interface honed during many years of evolution. By the crafty and improper use of the words, I assume Cummings is one of the mass produced English majors trying to make a living in a hostile world.
Standardized means consensus. And while replacing a pedal on my bike requires the same tool for almost all makes of bikes, the same web browser has to have one team for each supported operating system and the features can differ in the sense that one system has it, another doesn't and the third will have it work differently. User awareness, on the other hand, has nothing to do with standardization, and has a lot with ergonomics.
Cummings is a veteran bureaucrat, specialized in make believe "I can train". He barely understands the tech side, being a mere ignorant user qualified to use a very user-friendly interface honed during many years of evolution. By the crafty and improper use of the words, I assume Cummings is one of the mass produced English majors trying to make a living in a hostile world.
July 29, 2013
Its a good book, and it is telling about the latest and modern teaching techniques in this modern age, where everything is available at Wikipedia. Wiki is providing information about almost every topic, which is being searched these days. In this modern age, the book is telling about the great teaching techniques.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews