Genres in the MOOCology of Writing

With constant emergence of cloud services and platforms for learning at a global scale, the field of education is in the midst of exploring and adapting to new pedagogical features afforded by these environments. Among the most debated is the development of MOOCs, short for massive open online courses, which pose questions to the traditional brick-and-mortar teaching model and implore new ways for instruction and learning. While some studies have looked at the effectiveness of MOOCs as a mode of delivery, there still lacks a genre approach to analyzing MOOCs as socio-rhetorical systems that have complex relationships with other social entities in the larger ecology of learning. With an eye toward how writing is taught and learned in the MOOC context, I investigate the kinds of course genre invented or reimagined by the cloud technologies and pedagogies afforded by MOOCs, and how those affordances facilitate writing instruction. Specifically, I use Activity Theory to highlight the genre activities specific to two composition MOOCs. By situating these MOOCs as activity systems, I offer an informed observation on the genre components affecting how students learn about writing in MOOC settings. These insights lead to numerous pedagogical implications, including the need to treat MOOCs as an emerging learning ecology that is different from conventional models.

Doctoral Learning and Cognitive Apprenticeship

This chapter discusses the role of cloud technology tools in helping build mentoring relationships in online doctoral programs, drawing on examples and experiences observed in the author's 15 years as a PhD dissertation chair. Ideas of cognitive apprenticeship and learning communities together provide a framework for identifying methods and skills that are helpful in the development of emerging scholars. The author describes the steps of modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, and exploration in the context of helping doctoral learners through to completion. Practical implications of using cloud technologies such as web conferencing, folder and file sharing, scheduling tools, and learning management systems are discussed through examples. The author also considers online strategies for fostering of one on one mentoring relationships for doctoral research and writing, as well as establishing and maintaining communities of doctoral peer groups.

Translingual and Digital Ecologies

Scholarship in cloud pedagogy has provided intriguing lenses through which researchers enhance pedagogical approaches for digital composition classrooms. However, there is a lack of discussion on how cloud pedagogy could be employed to benefit second language learners of writing. Scholars in both digital and translingual areas of research have touched on conceptualizing their theories through multimodal, collaborative, and ecological perspectives of writing. Therefore, this article looks into the theories and practices of translingualism, and explore how translingual writing can be merged and integrated into the multimodal applications of cloud-based learning. Following and expanding the practices of digital composition, this paper aims to argue for an ontological shift to a translingual view of cloud-based writing and examine how it informs second language learning.

Cloud- and Crowd-Networked Pedagogy

Our knowledge is constantly shifting from analog literacies to digital literacies, industrial literacies to information societies, paper literacies to screen literacies, and mono-modal literacies to multimodal literacies for which digital technology and/or digital culture has become a dynamic and evolving force. Concerning the literacy shifts whether we realize or not, we are invariably encountering digital technologies and are explicitly and/or implicitly embracing such knowledge shift in almost all across the world without any exception. This knowledge shift demonstrates that digital literacy has become an inescapable component of our daily life in the context of the 21st century's digital world. In this chapter, I will discuss affordances of cloud/digital pedagogies such as what teaching, learning, and writing are in digital context, how digital, cloud, or crowd pedagogy currently became an inescapable element, and why instructors from any global communities (should) welcome this pedagogical shift in academic spaces. Additionally, this chapter stresses on how instructors can engage students in the cloud environment, how students can share a complex set of linguistic and cultural narratives, and how students can collaborate and cooperate to create their realities in the context of the 21st century's networked classrooms.

Using the Hybrid Interactive Rhetorical Engagement (H.I.R.E.) Metrics to Analyze the Effectiveness of E-Learning Websites

The rapid development of Web-based learning technologies has become a global phenomenon that affects higher education institutions. Both developing and developed countries are eager to take advantage of the multi-modal and asynchronous technical capacities that Web 2.0 can provide to college students. The “E-learning Phenomenon” has also prompted the development of different types of learning tools, ranging from commercially-developed Blackboard, open-source learning platform Moodle, or less popular platform developed by individual universities around the world. This study applied a theoretical concept, Hybrid Interactive Rhetorical Engagement (H.I.R.E.), and a series of quantitative metrics derived from H.I.R.E., to assess the Digital Learning Website developed at Kainan University, Taiwan. Exploratory empirical findings help college instructors to understand whether H.I.R.E. serves a good system design concept explain and predict users' learning behaviors and can be used to assess a variety of web-learning technologies in the market.

Scaffolding Agency and Responsibility in Cloud-Based Collaborative Writing

Although most students regularly interact online for social reasons, many are uncomfortable collaborating for academic work, even work utilizing familiar cloud technology. Because collaborative writing in digital spaces is becoming commonplace in work and academic environments, composition teachers must help students to recognize their individual agency within group work and to develop strategies for a shared writing process. How can we scaffold online writing experiences so that our students' ability to collaborate emerges as a strategic and still-developing part of the learning process? In this chapter we discuss strategies for scaffolding a collaborative writing process using Google Docs in the composition classroom. We describe four sample activities appropriate for undergraduate writing courses: anonymous invention, group annotated bibliographies, group agendas and project plans, and peer review. We suggest best practices for developing individual agency and shared responsibility for group writing in the cloud.

Phases, Scaffolds, and Technology

With ubiquitous Internet and the related tools, including computational devices and cloud-based technology, has come public access to a world of information literally at one's fingertips. This has led to the increased use of cloud-based student collaboration as a key strategy for engaging students as responsible, creative, and productive participants in the learning process. For the purpose of this qualitative study there are three objectives: 1) update and revise a course design model for cloud-based student collaboration that uses phases and scaffolds, and includes an optimal cloud-based collaboration toolkit identified by graduate students, 2) describe an online course wherein this model has been applied, and 3) share exemplar course materials including guides, learning plans and directions, and content scaffolds in the form of templates, that support this model and can be repurposed by anyone using cloud-based student collaboration in higher education.

New Media and Technology

New media and technology have an overall impact in our lives including the way we write and read a text, and teach writing. By altering our literacy practices, new media and technology always create a new situation, and require the users to use it in a defined way, and “to explain what a tool [technology] is and how to use it seems to demand narrative” (Nye, 2006, p. 5). In this chapter, the author creates a narrative that tells stories how new media and technology have created a new situation to redefine/reexamine/remap/revive the existing notions of the rhetorical situation. The author begins by offering a definition of new media and technology, and the impact of new media and technology in changing the notions of the rhetorical situation. The author then discusses how new media and technology has changed the notions of the rhetorical situation.

Pervasive Pedagogy

Cloud-based services designed for educational use, like Google Apps for Education (GAFE), afford deeply collaborative activities across multiple applications. Through primary research, the authors discovered that cloud-based technologies such as GAFE and Google Drive afford new opportunities for collaborative cross-platform composing and student engagement. These affordances require new pedagogies to transform these potentialities into practice, as well as a reexamination of contemporary theory of computers and composition. The authors' journey implementing Google Drive as a composing and communication environment required continually remediating content, relationships, practices, and their own identities as they interacted with students in the cloud. This chapter addresses how GAFE and Google Drive engage students in the composition classroom, redefine and transform pedagogical and curricular concepts, and improve students' experience and learning.

Teaching and Learning in the Cloud

Knowledge is no longer produced exclusively in the traditional class-based learning environment. For twenty-first century learners, digitally networked classrooms are the new social spaces where innovative learning perspectives are cultivated. However, like traditional class-based learning environments, digitally networked classrooms need to be sensitive to the social forces of race, gender, and class that will inescapably invade digital cultures. Therefore, even in the cloud, this chapter argues, “difference” as a concept is always already embedded as a contributing feature under which knowledge is constructed and constructing. To this end, this chapter suggests that a consideration of “difference” and its signifying effect on cloud pedagogy is a useful lens to explore the phrase “anywhere anytime” to the term “anybody” in the digitally networked classroom. Finally, this chapter proposes that the model “anywhere, anytime, anybody” must become part of the basic structure of a democratic and collaborative knowledge building community to democratize teaching and learning in the cloud.