Effects of Online, Collaborative Discourse on Secondary Student Writing: A Case Study of the History and Ecology of an Electronic Exchange

Technological environments where teens spend much of their time after school are environments that educators seldom use in classroom instruction. These Web 2.0 environments are participatory, collaborative environments where teens share music, files, pictures, and ideas and are influenced by the information shared by others within their Web 2.0 environments. This study looks at a particular online environment, the Bread Loaf Teacher Network, and how secondary student writing is affected by the collaborative nature of electronic exchanges conducted on this online network. This study analyzed the history and ecology of one electronic exchange (a technological, participatory discourse community within the classroom) that has been replicated using the described format by hundreds of teachers over the course of the past 15 years on BreadNet, the private, online network of the Bread Loaf School of English. Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory, M. M. Bakhtin's discourse theory, and Lev Vygotsky's social constructivism formed the conceptual framework for this study. Through the intrinsic case study of Pass the Poetry, an electronic exchange conducted on BreadNet via the Bread Loaf Teacher Network, the researcher traced the writings of four students using the transcript of the year-long exchange looking for evidence of student transactions with literature, watching for changes in writing fluency and syntactical complexity, observing responses to peer and adult audiences, and searching for evidence that students change their writing as a result of interactions with their audiences. Data sources for the research included the transcript of the exchange, open-ended surveys of four students who participated in the exchange, interviews of the two teachers who planned the exchange, and an outside correspondent/poet who participated directly with students in the exchange. An ecological metaphor described the components of the exchange. Themes identified in the research included student literary transactions, the role of audience, analysis of syntactic complexity, and online relationship building.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Education in Curriculum Studies (Ed.D.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation (open access)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading

Year dc:date.available

2008

Author dc:creator

• Rucker, Julie Henderson

Contributors dc:contributor

• John Weaver
• Stephen Jenkins
• Dixie Goswami

• ETD
• Web 20
• Writing process
• Literary transactions
• Writing fluency
• Syntactical complexity
• Electronic exchange ecology
• Collaboration
• Participatory
• Audience
• Discourse
• Network
• Poetry
• Case study
• T-unit analysis
• Constructivism
• Language arts (Secondary)
• United States
• English language
• Composition and exercises
• Study and teaching (Secondary)

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/506

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu:etd-1506