E-Mail, Participatory Learning, and Survival:
Using E-Mail to Support Learning, While Still Having Time for a Life

William Condon, Director
Campus Writing Programs
Washington State University

"At the simplest level , anyone whose class has access to e-mail and who can set up any kind of e-mail group can teach in a virtual classroom"

From "Virtual Space, Real Participation: Dimensions
and Dynamics of a Virtual Classroom"

Why E-Mail?

E-mail is ubiquitous—almost everyone with access to the Internet uses e-mail. E-mail is typically the first application new Internet users learn, as well as the one they use most frequently. It is also the most available of Internet technologies, thanks to all the .com companies that offer free accounts and to e-mail's ease of use. E-mail has served as the gateway to the Internet, so, for now at least, it presents a welcoming space for conversation—conversation in writing, of course. We teachers of writing should not lose sight of the fact that what we have our students do in this medium they can only do by using the very construct (writing) which we teach. Indeed, online, their writing is their presence; they are literally not there if their writing is not there. Thus, to the extent that an e-mail list is a kind of virtual classroom, it is not just a writing classroom: it is a written classroom.

Online Collaborative Learning

The need to contribute in order to exist results in e-mail's being a natural space for collaborative learning. One e-mail looks very much like another, basically, whether the writer is the teacher or a student, whether the writer is from the suburbs or the inner city, whether the writer is from the upper socioeconomic classes or the lower--even, in my experience, whether the writer is a native speaker of English or not. The only way to distinguish one speaker from another is by the content of the message. This leveling effect creates an environment in which students can often more easily collaborate than they can face to face.

Why Collaborate?

We've all heard the old saying:
I hear, and I forget
I see, and I remember
I do , and I learn

In an earlier session, Donna Reiss demonstrated the value of collaborative learning, so I will not go over again the ground she so ably covered. Instead, I will just emphasize that engaging students in collaborative learning—especially in time that used to be given over to lecture/demonstration—means that students are doing, that they are engaged in the central activity that higher education is all about: knowledge making. First-year composition is the principal site where students begin the transformation from consumer of knowledge to transformer of knowledge. First-year composition is also the class least likely to make students sit and listen. Thus, our composition classes already constitute fertile ground for exploring active learning and critical thinking—and for replacing a fairly frequent emphasis on "invented" content (often derived from some standard reader selected by a committee) with an emphasis on making knowledge, and emphasis that inevitably focuses less attention on the teacher and more attention on the learner.

The Role of E-Mail

Using e-mail boosts the teacher's ability to promote active learning and critical thinking. This troika results in what I like to call Participatory Learning. By de-centering the class, e-mail promotes collaborative learning, increases the writing students do, and creates real audiences for that writing. It also ups the students' stake in the class by opening active roles for students in the class. How does all this work? Well, we can begin our conversation by using these links:

Projects that Work

E-Mail-based Invention
E-Mail-based Peer Response
Collaborative Resource-Building

E-Mail-based Invention [back to projects that work]

In class, begin a discussion of an issue about which many different views exist. Tease out as many major positions as possible. Ideally, the issue might seem two-sided (to return Elian Gonzales or not) but in discussion several other positions come out (the INS record of breaking up families, the number of children who are allowed to stay here under similar circumstances, VP Gore's position, the various positions among the Cuban community in Miami, Attorney General Reno's position, etc.). Assign each student in the class one of these positions (it's all right to duplicate—to assign one position to more than one student).

The e-mail assignment:

1. Investigate their assigned position and post a statement to the class's e-mail list stating and justifying that position. (Day One)
2. Look at the positions others have posted and write a reply to at least three other messages, agreeing or disagreeing based on the respondent's assigned position. This response should be as fully justified as the original position statement. (Day Two)
3. In class, reassign the positions so that each student now has a different one. (Day Three)
4. Repeat steps one and two. (Days Four and Five)
5. Each student drafts an essay in which s/he takes the position s/he actually holds on the issue (note: this position may differ from any of those the class came up with), taking into account the positions s/he knows, by now, that other people hold on the issue.

This very simple process for collaborative invention has several strengths. First, if the issue comes from the students, then class activity will focus on an issue in which the students have interest and investment. Second, the initial discussion may take no more than half of one class period, yet it results in considerable activity outside class—five days of position-and-response, followed by drafting an essay. Third, this is an activity the instructor can join in on with the students—as a participant, rather than in the role of teacher. Finally, as the drafts come back into class for peer response, the peer reviewers will have extensive knowledge of the writer's topic, allowing for much more intensive and helpful peer review sessions.

E-Mail-based Peer Response [ back to projects that work]

(Adapted from Condon and Butler, Writing the Information Superhighway, Chapter Three, Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997.)

E-Mail and Peer Review--some advice for writers

The most valuable resource for a writer is a careful, critical, yet tactful reader. When you find one, marry him (her). Seriously. No regrets. In the meantime, you can both give and receive help with your writing via e-mail, from a classmate, from local or distant friends (remember, you can reach all sorts of places instantly with e-mail). But take some care. Remember, when you send a draft to someone else, you've violated some of the assumptions people have about e-mail. In particular, the message will most likely be far longer than one or two screens, and you'll probably be asking for more than one kind of help. So give your reader/reviewer some help.

This structure will help you focus the reader's attention on the points you worry most about, and it will allow the reader to respond to all your concerns. And the final list of questions will give the reader a place to respond to problems you may not have anticipated.

Collaborative Resource-Building [ back to projects that work]

Have students gather information and write about topics on which they can build authority—and about which, ideally, no authoritative resources exist. Here are two examples:

Writing in the Disciplines

(adapted from "Renegotiating Empowerment: Moving
a Collaborative Writing Assignment into Virtual Space."
Wings 1 (Spring 1994), 6-7. Rpt. in Wings:
A Special Edition, (Spring 1996), 10-11.)

Renegotiating Empowerment:
Moving a Collaborative Writing Assignment into Virtual Space

The only valid reason to use computer technology in teaching writing (or anything else, for that matter) is that the technology allows us to do something useful that we could not or would not have done in the absence of the technology. Computer-mediated communications fits that definition, for me, precisely because the way my students work and learn in that environment far outstrips what happens when I use the same assignments and approaches in a traditional classroom setting. And when I construct a virtual classroom as an extension of my computer-equipped classroom, thus reducing the limitations of time and space, I lead my students into an environment that is close to the ideal for a writing class. In this new environment, where students communicate synchronously and asynchronously, students must renegotiate themselves, the classroom, and their assignments. As a result, students rely on themselves and on each other more than on their teacher (me); they learn to work with a wide range of source materials; they gain experience bringing order out of large and seemingly chaotic sets of information; and they begin to break out of what Freire calls the banking system of education, opting instead for active involvement in their own education.

Let me justify the above claims by using an extended example, a six-week assignment that prompts students to study discipline-centered academic writing. During the first week of the assignment, students find and interview a person who is , ideally, actually employed in the student's chosen field--i.e., a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a social worker, an actor, a pharmacist, etc. However, the subject must at least be a graduate student in that field. The students ask a set of questions that elicit an accurate sense of the role writing plays in the chosen field: they ask the subject how s/he uses writing in his or her job or studies, what kinds of writing s/he does, how much writing s/he does, how much freedom s/he has in choosing topics, whether s/he typically writes alone or in collaboration with others, what audiences s/he writes for, what sorts of deadlines s/he works under, what percentage of time on the job would s/he estimate s/he spends writing, what tools the subject uses in doing the writing, how important writing is to the person’s success in the job, whether the person was a "good writer" in college and whether that training helped on the job, etc. This information goes into a two- or three-page report that summarizes the information gleaned in the interview. That report is posted to the class's E-mail list, so that all the students in the class can read it.

This first step, in my class of sixteen students, creates between thirty-two and forty-eight pages of information about writing on the job in several disciplines, and students immediately begin to compare these results, both directly and indirectly. Since in any given class there are sure to be two or more aspiring engineers, doctors, or lawyers, for example, the class can make direct comparisons of subjects in the same career but in different jobs or at different levels of responsibility. And since an undergraduate concentration could lead a student in one of several directions, the data contain information that students find fascinating. They also find the data surprising, since the interviewees always do more writing than the students--especially in science concentrations--expected to find in that field. The most important factor, though, is that the postings involve the students with each other as sources. Students begin to care deeply about their performance on this part of the assignment. Those who posted fully developed, detailed summaries act as models for those who didn’t, and I often find that students who post short or perfunctory summaries revisit this part of the assignment and post a fuller, more useful summary, not wanting to let their classmates down. The implicit peer review involved in juxtaposing one student’s response with another’s prompts all the students to take more responsibility for their research, to see themselves as members of a learning community. Students can see that if one member lets the community down, then the resources available to the community as a whole suffer.

The second phase of the assignment involves another collaborative creation of resources. This time, students locate the two most influential professional journals in their fields, examine the two most recent volumes of each, and perform a kind of content analysis. They look for what kinds of articles appear there, what major are topics discussed, and what kinds of studies, methods, etc., are prevalent. They also try to describe the writing in the journals, looking for differences from one journal to the other, whether the writers seem to follow one or a few identifiable formats and what, besides articles, is in the journals. Then the students select two articles of interest and read them. Again, the output is a report in which students describe the writing they find in the journals, as well as the experience of reading those articles.

At this stage, students begin to develop the sense that our large, seemingly uniform academic community actually comprises many distinct discourse communities. The reports posted to the e-mail list reveal how writing in one discipline differs from that in another, and they begin to realize that "academic writing," different and difficult as it may be, is not a monolithic mystery, but a composite of the kinds of writing that is produced by specialists in a field "talking" to each other. Their descriptions are thick with discoveries: academic writing differs markedly from what students find in their textbooks; academic writing is filled with jargon and specialized terms that mystify the uninitiated but seem to make perfect sense to the professionals; when experts write to one another, they generate large amounts of writing about narrowly constructed subjects; academic writing involves intensive reading, as well as active engagement with a wide variety of ideas from a wide variety of authors. If I were to lecture about this topic, class would be extremely dull, and I could not begin to cover the breadth that a classful of students can. But the e-mail discussion allows students to develop a working definition of academic writing that is at once more detailed, more interesting, and more credible than anything I could possibly tell them or show them. This stage of the assignment engages students because they are actively involved in producing what is for them new knowledge, and they have a stake in doing a good job because, again, they belong to a learning community.

Stage three involves the students in a comparison of publications aimed for different audiences. This time, the students search for a popular magazine that includes articles from the students' chosen fields of concentration, and they perform the same kind of analysis they did for the professional journals. This time, the reports focus on the differences in language, in contrast to the journals, and differences in the kinds of articles. Students compare the experience of reading these magazines, which are written to include the novice, with the experience of reading the journals, where the language seems geared to exclude the novice. At this point, the students begin to understand where the boundaries of academic writing are, as well as the factors that distinguish academic writing from other forms. Finally, they are able to make critical comparisons, assessing both the strengths and shortcomings of writing in and for the academy, as opposed to writing in the workday world or the popular press. Again, reading and discussing the reports via e-mail allows students both to build and then to explore, or process, a large and complex information resource.

After building a resource base that has grown to more than two hundred pages' worth of writing, students write an essay that seems almost an anti-climax. But here they learn to sift and winnow, to sort through massive amounts of data, to ask more questions, in order to clarify vague or incomplete entries. They struggle to impose order on a large and often chaotic set of information, to find a structure that will allow them first to discover what they want to say and then to write the essay. And, of course, the process of communication and sharing continues as they post their drafts for peer review.

This assignment can be used--indeed, I have used it--in a traditional classroom, without benefit of e-mail. However, in that setting, the logistics are daunting, the amount of paper involved (each student distributing a copy of each stage's report to sixteen classmates) is staggering, and the time available for interaction is limited. More important, though, is the fact that in the traditional classroom this assignment results in a lot of teacher talk, which means that students still rely on me as the organizer, the catalyst, the one who really knows what is going on. When I use e-mail as the medium, I rarely have to say anything. Indeed, my contributions, in comparison with the students', are negligible. They are in charge. Their materials make up the book-length resource; their replies to the messages raise the issues for discussion; their contributions define and direct that process; and their reviews of each others' drafts carry great weight: since each of them has just written a similar kind of essay, each has a kind of credible expertise to offer in peer review. Thus, an assignment such as this one fulfills the "prime directive" for using computers in a writing classroom--the technology allows us to do something useful that we could not or would not have done in the absence of the technology. Using the technology, I can watch my students become a learning community--indeed, a discourse community in their own right--and I can watch as they begin to write academic writing, not just read it or read about it. Those important steps do not happen when I use the same assignment in a traditional classroom setting.

Collaborative Inquiry

From "Virtual Space, Real Participation: Dimensions and Dynamics of a Virtual Classroom"

What Is a Liberal Arts Education? A Collaborative Project

The virtual classroom experience I want to explore took place in the fall term of 1993, and it involved students in three writing classes, my own at the University of Michigan's English Composition Board (ECB), one supervised by David Jolliffe at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and one team-taught by Theresa Doerfler and Rob Davis at The Ohio State University at Columbus (OSU). The students in these classes never met together in one place. Instead, they communicated and collaborated in virtual space, using an asynchronous conferencing program developed at Michigan and called Confer. Confer arranges discussions by item, so that each item could be conceived as a workspace for an interscholastic team of students. In addition, the program retains all entries in chronological order within items, so that at any time the entire transcript of the work that has taken place there is available to all the participants. (NOTE: This process could easily be accomplished using a listserv for all the students and e-mail groups for each team.)

The team of teachers met in August and identified a five-week window that would allow courses at institutions on three different academic calendars--quarters, semesters, and trimesters--to "gather" and work together on a project that would invite the students to explore the meaning of "liberal arts education" as it was put into action on each of the campuses. We then devised the following sequence of activities:

After the five-week period was finished, each member of the class revised the group essay as she or he saw fit. The essay then became part of the student's graded work.

Managing the Workload
(i.e., saving time to have a life)

Take "Student-Centered" seriously.

If you make the students responsible for the work—and make them responsible to each other, then you can relax and enjoy the activity. All you have to monitor is whether they do the work, not how well they are doing it. For example, if you are conducting the exercise in collaborative invention, all you need to do is count the responses to be sure that all the students are participating. Send a quick e-mail to the slackers. Voila! You don't really need to do more. Then, if you have the students use their drafts in the peer response exercise, you are, again, sitting on the sidelines—or at most acting as a resource for the groups—as the essays move from first to second draft. At some point, probably on the second draft, you'll want to comment on (or even grade) the writing. By that time, however, the class will have done two or three weeks' work without taking up much of your time and energy. You can focus on other agendas in the meantime, of course, since almost all this activity has taken place via e-mail—outside class time.

Do no more than they do

If you are the kind who just can't stay out of it, then participate. Do exactly what they do—no more, no less. Do resist the temptation to take over the activity, since that would undermine the value of their collaborative learning. And by participating with your students you'll (a) model the kinds of positions and responses they should make and (b) know enough of what's going on to trouble-shoot any problems.

Use performance assessment

Online collaborative learning generates a large number of products that can count, potentially, in a grade. Say, for example, that your students did the "Elian" project. Each one will (or won't) have the following products (at least):

Items 1-4 can earn students performance credit—if the messages are there, then the students get credit toward the grade. Item 5 could be the product you evaluate qualitatively, for the major portion of the grade. So, for example, you might say that students can only receive full credit for the essay if items 1-4 are there, and you could deduct a percentage of the final essay grade for each incomplete item. Or, if you're grading by portfolio, students might be able to select from items such as 1-4 the ones they think are their best—and explain those choices in a reflective piece (which adds one more item to the list of products, yes?).

Performance assessment creates more opportunities for learning, and it puts a large measure of control into the students' hands. While this form of assessment won't save you any time, it will allow you to focus your time and effort at points where you think you can do the most good.

Resources