Getting students to write has to be one of the most difficult things to do. I can remember even when I was a child writing had to be my least favorite thing to do in school. In fact I can remember having to do it as a punishment for misbehaving in class, as in having to write "I must not talk" 100 X. Maybe it's just instinctive in us as humans, but even for that I would try to be creative. It's funny how I can recall coming up with inventive ways to even write that, thinking for instance that perhaps if I wrote each word individually a hundred times first on a new line like this, "I, I, I, I .... must, must, must...,etc." it would get done more quickly. Who knows though, perhaps it was having to do that "task" (as the term was used back then) so many times which made me associate picking up a pencil to write something burdensome, even when writing about a topic I may have enjoyed. Writing for pleasure as in reading for pleasure were not things I associated with "pleasure" until much later in my young adult years. What a wonder wikis seem to be now. If only I had had the opportunity "as a punishment" to read an on-line Wiki and make a written contribution to it. Perhaps that would have spurred in me an earlier desire to research and write and not have looked at it as a burden. But having around a wiki or not really doesn't matter. A tool not used is just as useless as a tool not around. A creative teacher then could have made a writing assignment just as pleasurable then as now. Application of a tool can not be haphazard either. A wiki has many affordances to learning; from writing which leads to easy and fun ways to edit, a la wiki, by being able to highlight and play around with font and other such things that a toolbar provides. The further adding in of audio and video, and the uploading of files and pictures. All of these aspects that a wiki allows for can create a nice collaborative event. Instead of getting into trouble and talking with my school age friends we could have been involved with a wiki on whatever the subject was that held our attention. Maybe as a punishment in these modern times the task of "withholding writing" would be even more severe then mine was back in the day. What a punishment that would be, taking away the privilege and not being allowed to write on a wiki anymore.
Ah memories! My third grade teacher had three giant metal shelves 6 feet high and three feet wide filled to the brim with stacks and stacks of purple worksheets. She must have copied her entire year at once because at the beginning of the year you couldn't put a puff of air in the spaces between the piles of worksheets. She just sat there at her desk with her poofy hair eating a giant lollipops (every day, weird) smelling of some Avon scent my mother liked.
ReplyDeleteI would have liked doing a wiki. Unfortunately, however, we didn't know the internet existed.